V 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

||jtp; ... ... _ ©iap3jrigftt Ifa + 

Shelf, 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



PRAYER-MEETING 
THEOLOGY 

H Dialogue 



BY 



E. J. MORRIS 

AUTHOR OF "PREJUDICED INQUIRIES" 



O, 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK LONDON 

27 West Twenty-third St. 24 Bedford St., Strand 

(Ib^e Knickerbocker |)ress 
1892 






jp^S* 






Copyright, 1892 

by! 
E. J. MORRIS 



Printed and Bound by 

Ube Knickerbocker fl>reee, flew HJoi h 
G. P. Putnam's Sons 



PRAYER-MEETING THEOLOGY. 



PRAYER-MEETING THEOLOGY. 

I. 

A LITTLE Congregational church in a se- 
questered Welsh settlement in Pennsylvania 
has kept up its weekly prayer-meeting without 
intermission, summer and winter, seedtime and 
harvest, for more than half a century. The 
attendance is never large ; and the long series of 
meetings has been maintained unbroken mainly 
through the remarkable tenacity of a very few 
of the members in successive generations. 
There are three brethren now living who have 
not missed a prayer-meeting in twenty years. 
They have been there all by themselves 
more than once. They have often in busy 
times gone to meeting from the fields, sup- 
perless, without change of garments, and with 
unwashed hands. They have hurried home 
from distant points with much difficulty, 
through snow-drifts and blinding storms, in 
order to be found in their places at the ap- 

i 



2 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

pointed hour. The worldly wisdom of the 
neighborhood pronounces such zeal intemper- 
ate and fanatical ; and a great deal of spark- 
ling wit has from time to time been expended 
upon the spiritual pride and hypocrisy and 
inconsistency of these pillars of the church. 
But pillars they are after all ; and the prayer- 
meeting, if not the church, plainly owes its 
continuous life under God to their exemplary 
steadfastness. 

At a recent meeting there were just a dozen 
persons present all told ; and the majority of 
these were children, who huddled together into 
one roomy pew at a chilling distance from the 
adult worshippers. There was no sweet singer 
to lead the psalmody, and no one to play on the 
little instrument which often keeps the musi- 
cal part of the service from collapsing. Brother 
A read a favorite chapter from the Epistle to 
the Romans, and made a prayer full of scrip- 
ture and sound doctrine. He was followed in 
prayer by B and C. Then after the three 
brethren had spoken a few words by way of 
exhortation, the meeting broke up with a pain- 
ful rendering of Old Hundred. The chil- 
dren hurried out as fast as good manners would 



Prayer -Meeting Theology. 3 

allow ; and the sweet chime of merry voices 
going up the road furnished an after-piece in 
curious contrast to the service just ended. As 
it was still early, the meeting having been un- 
usually short, the men remained in their places 
to " visit " a little after the rest of the congre- 
gation had dispersed. The conversation, hav- 
ing lightly touched a number of every-day 
topics, came round to religious matters ; and 
they discussed for the thousandth time a ques- 
tion which always interests and always baffles 
them and their brethren throughout all Chris- 
tendom : What is the matter with the prayer- 
meeting ? The discussion, when fairly under 
way, took something like the following form. 

A. Of course we may receive a blessing our- 
selves in every meeting if our hearts are sincere. 
Still you must see that our meetings are not 
what they should be. What is it that keeps 
the people away ? 

B. That I cannot tell. Some are sick per- 
haps, and some are aged and infirm. Some 
are pressed with many cares ; and possibly 
some stay away because others do, never 
imagining that the good Lord can do anything 
for them without the aid of a crowd. For my- 



4 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

self I scarcely ever stop to think whether we 
are few or many here. In truth I come here 
to get away from a crowd rather than to look 
for one. The thoughts which distract a man 
all day even in solitude make an hour of quiet 
worship exceedingly grateful whether the com- 
pany be great or small. I thought the other 
day that I should even like to come in here all 
alone sometimes. I was passing the Catholic 
church in the village when a poor lame wash- 
erwoman laid down her basket at the door and 
went in. Being at leisure I also stepped in 
from mere curiosity. At first I could see no 
one. The building seemed entirely deserted. 
But on advancing I found the woman on her 
knees, clasping her hands in prayer, regardless 
of the presence of an intruder, mindful only of 
the Adorable Presence before which she bowed. 
In the empty church she was with angels and 
archangels and all the company of heaven. 

C. That was all as it should be. The Lord 
is always to be found in a Catholic church and 
in a Protestant church likewise. But so also may 
He be found wherever we earnestly seek Him, 
in our homes, or in the fields and the woods 
where we ply our daily tasks. I heartily be- 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 5 

lieve in public worship, not on account of any 
sacredness attaching to houses made with 
hands for the Most High, but on account of 
the sacredness of human souls, on account of 
the blessedness of the communion of saints. 
The true temple of God is built of living 
stones. We are His temple. His presence is 
made manifest in the life and fellowship of 
His people rather than in any consecrated 
places or forms of worship. I should be dis- 
posed to say that the people stay away from 
church because we, who are always here and 
who are responsible for the proceedings, fail to 
make full proof of our ministry ; because we 
are so stiff, so inert, so inhospitable and bar- 
ren. Perhaps the very furniture of the house 
deemed so sacred, perhaps the order of ser- 
vice deemed more sacred still, may to some ex- 
tent defeat the true purpose of our meetings. 
A gathering with such an origin and such a 
purpose as ours, one would think, should be, 
first of all, an actual meeting, an open, 
free, general, unconstrained, real meeting of 
man with man. I almost think that the in- 
formal meetings of Christian men at the cor- 
ner store and at the post-office every evening 



6 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

copy the methods of the upper chamber in 
Jerusalem more closely than we do. Our 
meetings are too formal. We have a set per- 
formance which is always the same or nearly 
so. We are altogether too solemn, too little 
human. We want the frank question, the 
homely story, the smile, and the harmless laugh 
of real life. Or rather we want the freedom and 
actual contact of mind with mind, of which these 
are some of the commonest signs and accom- 
paniments. It may require a peculiar tempera- 
ment or a special training not possible for all 
Christian people, to find strength and joy in 
the solitary church-going of the Catholic wash- 
erwoman, or even in our own awkward and 
stereotyped services. 

A. I confess that our meetings are not ex- 
actly amusing, and not quite so free and easy 
as the nightly palaver at the corner store. But 
why should they be ? Cannot reasonable crea- 
tures afford to meet for a single hour in the 
week to worship God together in all serious- 
ness ? The trouble is much deeper than any 
dryness or meagreness in our services. Chris- 
tians have in other times found delight and 
profit in meetings very much longer and 



Prayer- Meeting Theology* 7 

drearier than ours. The people nowadays stay- 
away from the prayer-meeting because they are 
more or less tainted with the pestilent scepti- 
cism which is spreading through the land. 
They are losing their interest in Christian 
ordinances quite naturally because they have 
already in a great measure lost their faith in 
Christian truth. There are members of this 
church not a few whose delight is in unchris- 
tian speculation, and who meditate in the liter- 
ature of unbelief day and night. You know 
that the blasphemer who lectured in the hall the 
other evening on what he called Mother-Goose 
Religion, made more of a stir among the peo- 
ple than our good pastor has been able to make 
for many a year by the faithful preaching of 
Gospel truth. 

B. I am afraid you are hitting at me now. 
I listened to that lecture with a good deal of 
interest, and I must confess that I am often 
slow of heart to believe what our good minis- 
ter has to set before us. I agree with you that 
the prevailing uncertainty about Christian truth 
is drying the blood of our Christian life. I 
regret it most sincerely. But I can throw no 
stones at the doubters. I have felt the poison 



8 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

in my own soul, and I feel it more and more 
every day. I try to hold the faith as the spider 
taketh hold of her house with her hands. But 
some invisible current carries it away from me 
bit by bit. We have fallen upon evil days. 
Our age seems to be, by some dire necessity, 
an age of doubt and unbelief. 

C. There is unbelief enough now and always. 
But our age is no worse than other ages. The 
distinction is frequently made, I know, between 
ages of faith and ages of doubt or unbelief. 
But faith and doubt are not sandwiched sepa- 
rately among the generations. They exist 
side by side in every age, and side by side 
frequently in the mind of the same indi- 
vidual. If the Son of Man should come 
now, He would probably find as much faith on 
the earth as He could have found at any former 
time. Much of what is stigmatized as doubt 
in our day is not doubt in any evil sense, being 
simply the natural movement of the mind tow- 
ards truth not yet attained. And much of 
what was called faith in former days was not 
faith in any good sense, but a superstitious 
prostration of the mind before some external 
authority, or a sheer withdrawal of its active 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. § 

powers from religious questions. The unbelief 
of our time is more loquacious than that of 
some former ages. But this is a gain. Unbe- 
lief will have some evil issue. Is it not well 
that it should spend itself in talk, though the 
talk be blasphemous, as it necessarily must be ? 
You can at least reply to infidel arguments, 
and see clearly what they lead to. But what 
can you do with infidel souls which go on 
breeding sin and death in silence, disdaining 
to put forth any theoretical justification of 
themselves ? Even if the age seems to you 
an age of doubt, beware of assuming that 
it is such by any real necessity. Chal- 
lenge the necessity boldly, and explore the 
dark stream which is washing away your 
foundations. 

B. Your counsel is admirable. I particularly 
desire to do as you bid me. And if, with your 
general exhortation, you can furnish specific 
directions how to proceed, you will find me a 
ready and grateful pupil. 

A. I can give you specific directions. Leave 
those heretical books and papers alone for a 
season, and don't go tagging after the vain 
Jack-of-the-lantern doctors who have already 



to Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

lured you too far into the wilderness. Don't 
go near your advanced thinkers ; and if they 
come to you, put your fingers in your ears 
and let them prophesy to the winds of 
heaven. Don't be standing on tiptoe and 
stretching your neck over the fences to pry into 
fields which it is not intended, and not at all 
necessary, that you should know just yet. 
Recognize your limitations. Acknowledge 
also that your inheritance is rich and fair. 
Learn to lie down thankful and contented in 
green pastures and beside still waters. 

B. I can appreciate all that. But I presume 
Brother C has another widely divergent course 
marked out for me in his mind. 

C. I should not express myself precisely as 
A does, but the course which I should recom- 
mend to you may perhaps not be " another " 
after all. I acknowledge a man's right and 
duty under certain circumstances to close his 
ears and his eyes too, not only against error 
and vanity but against what may be good and 
true enough in its proper place and order. We 
shut out foreign goods, though confessedly 
excellent, from our markets, because we wish 
to build up our home industries. It may be 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. i 1 

necessary likewise to exclude from our minds 
much excellent foreign thought in order to pro- 
tect and develop our own. Our senses are the 
doors of the mind, and doors are made to shut 
as well as to open, to exclude as well as to 
admit. I observe in some quarters a disposi- 
tion to take the doors off their hinges and 
throw them away in rapturous hospitality ; 
and, when more room still is demanded, to tear 
down the walls also, that all the world may 
come in like a flood without let or hindrance. 
But when this is done, all house-keeping and 
all human living are at an end. Extravagant 
hospitality has ruined many a family, and too 
many new, vigorous, exacting ideas will devour 
your substance as fast as too many guests of 
any other description. The writer of the 
Fourth Gospel would not crowd his brethren's 
little world even with the sayings and doings 
of the Lord Jesus. He wished to leave them 
room to turn round and to do their proper 
work in their own world. And we certainly 
ought to claim the same privilege for ourselves 
against the greatest men and their very great- 
est thoughts. We must not suffer ourselves 
to be choked with knowledge, or to be driven 



i2 Prayer- Meeting Theology* 

to distraction by too much learning. I agree 
with A also in his high estimate of our actual 
condition. Knowing not fully what we shall 
be, it seems to me a very great thing to have 
become what we now are. Our present life 
appears to me so well worth living that it 
seems a pity, as well as a folly, to withdraw 
our thoughts and strength from it and burn 
them up in the attempt to scale the flaming 
walls of the world. We can well afford to eat 
our bread in gladness and singleness of heart, 
for threescore years and ten, right here, with 
all our limitations. But while rejoicing in our 
inheritance, and accepting our limitations, we 
need not put up artificial limitations for our- 
selves. Let us by all means keep contented 
within the fence. But is it a virtue to confine 
ourselves wilfully to a little corner of our own 
spacious field ? I believe that the doubts 
which trouble us and multitudes besides us at 
the present day are not promptings of the 
enemy urging us to flee into the wilderness, 
but natural and honest cravings for the fresh 
woods and pastures new which we have left 
unvisited though fairly within our borders. 
There is surely much that is unsound, and very 



Prayer -Meeting Theology. 13 

much that is immature, in our views of Chris- 
tian truth and of the life of man. Doubt, in 
such circumstances, need not come from the 
Evil One. It may well come to us by the grace 
of God, which will not suffer us to remain for 
ever in our infancy. See to it that in repress- 
ing your doubts you do not resist the Spirit of 
Truth and refuse to entertain angels. Repress 
no honest doubts. Give them a fair hearing. 
Bring them with you sometimes to the prayer- 
meeting which you love so well. They may 
stir up gifts of life which lie dormant within 
us all. They may even help to make the 
prayer-meeting as interesting to the people as 
the corner-store conferences. 

B. My doubts accompany me to the prayer- 
meeting and to other meetings altogether too 
often. But I do with them just as I do with 
old Shabby, my dog, when he follows me to 
church. I turn them back at the door if I 
can ; and if they baffle my efforts and slip in 
with me, I keep them as quiet as possible. 
Indeed I have little trouble with them after 
the service is fairly begun. They shrink away 
at the sound of prayer and praise ; nor can 
they abide the accents of the divine word. 



14 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

And I would rather be the witch of Endor 
than think of calling up their miserable appari- 
tions in the house of God. You are not serious 
in recommending it, are you ? 

C. Perhaps I was too hasty. If you find so 
great a discord between thoughts which are 
familiar to you out-of-doors and the regular 
exercises of the prayer-meeting, probably some 
others might feel it still more. But it may be 
that our prayer-meetings, and our other reli- 
gious services, have settled down on too narrow 
a basis. Perhaps they allow but a part of our 
nature to worship God, while they call the 
other parts common and unclean, and shut 
them out with the dogs. Perhaps, while our 
spirit prayeth, our understanding is unfruitful. 
But that is wrong, by the apostolic rule : " I will 
pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the 
understanding also." Our meetings, I believe, 
would be better in every respect if we brought 
with us all our laboring thoughts, suppressing 
none. But if this be more than some of us 
can bear, I certainly think that Christian peo- 
ple ought, at some suitable time and place, 
to consider the truths with which they have so 
much to do in relation to the requirements of 



Prayer -Meeting Theology. 15 

the intellect as well as in their relation to pious 
emotion and active duty. 

A. So you would turn the Church of Christ 
into a debating society, or into a school of phi- 
losophy ! You might as well shut it up at once, 
and bring back old heathendom in full force. 
Did not St. Paul renounce the wisdom of this 
world, and did not our Saviour say that we 
must become as little children if we would 
enter into the kingdom of God ? 

C. But St. Paul and our Saviour also reasoned 
carefully and powerfully in their own ministry ; 
and much of their work consisted in liberating 
men from the yoke of tradition, and in estab- 
lishing great principles so that they were com- 
mended to men's minds and consciences in the 
sight of God. 

A. Exactly. And why can we not rest in 
the principles which they established so firmly? 
What is established needs no further debating. 
Do you doubt the great truths which, through 
the blessed labors of Christ and His apostles 
have been commended to every man's con- 
science in the sight of God? 

C. Some of those great truths have been ob- 
scured and overladen with conflicting specula- 



1 6 Prayer -Meeting Theology. 

tions before our time. If there were but one 
statement of Christian truth, we might receive 
it without discussion. But a thousand con- 
tradictory voices, all professing to teach the 
truth as it is in Jesus, call for something of a 
debating society or even of a school of philos- 
ophy, to separate the precious from the vile, 
the true from the false. Even supposing the 
pure sifted truth is before us, our minds must 
still be allowed to take hold of it before they 
can be nourished by it ; and the mind takes hold 
of truth, not by passive assent, but by an ac- 
tive process in which a measure of doubt and 
speculation may be legitimate and even neces- 
sary. The attitude of some of your grim de- 
fenders of the faith towards Christian truth 
reminds one of the miser who, once for all, 
bought a piece of cheese for his dinner, and 
put it in a glass bottle to keep, and for ever 
after at meal time licked the bottle and saved 
the cheese. You protect the truth of the Gos- 
pel too much, turning the minds of men away 
from it, and so making it of none effect. Be- 
sides, our Lord had many things to say to His 
disciples which He did not say because the 
disciples were not prepared to receive them. 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 1 7 

What He did not say unto them He may by 
His Spirit make known unto us if so be that 
we refuse not His communications through 
distrust and fear, or through a stolid dispar- 
agement of all truth but that to which we 
have already attained. If we are prepared to 
welcome new truth, we must be prepared to 
revise and restate old doctrines, so that the old 
and the new may be joined together in har- 
monious and vital unity. It is my firm con- 
viction as to all the great Christian doctrines 
that the half has not been told concerning 
them ; that the progress of thought will mani- 
fest their glory and their fruitfulness more and 
more throughout all the time to come ; that 
honest doubt and the freest inquiry are there- 
fore to be regarded as means of grace by which 
we may humbly consult the Master and receive 
from time to time His latest word. 

B. I am glad to hear you put the matter so, 
and I trust that you may be right. But I have 
often felt that to call any accepted religious 
doctrines in question publicly, even with a 
view to restatement merely, brings doubt upon 
the whole system of Christian truth in the 
minds of many ; and I have sometimes thought 



1 8 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

that it may be better to subscribe to the whole 
mass of received opinion, with the inevitable 
mental reservations, than to run the risk of 
undermining the faith of any, and of bringing 
the truth itself into jeopardy with the error 
which we would disown. 

C. It is a poor faith that can be undermined 
by the truth, or by any earnest and reverent 
seeker after truth. And it is a poor precarious 
truth that cannot be stated as correctly as 
possible by its friends without being put in 
jeopardy by their painstaking loyalty. You 
fear a remote and doubtful evil. To avoid 
that you propose to walk meekly into a hurt- 
ful snare here present. Perish the thought ! If 
you have positive convictions at variance with 
those of others, be true to your own, and have 
no fear. Shake boldly the things that can be 
shaken by the highest, purest form of truth 
which you can attain to. The things which 
cannot be shaken will come more distinctly 
into view ; and they alone are worth caring 
about seriously. 

B. I have thought so many times, and I have 
often begun to survey my position in order to 
make an honest statement. But I have been 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 19 

frightened by my own thoughts every time. 
Let us go over the ground together before we 
mention our difficulties in the prayer-meeting 
or in any public place. 

A. I cannot understand what you would be 
at. The Christian faith seems to me so simple. 
And when you depart from the simplicity of 
the Gospel, you embark on a trackless and im- 
measurable sea. What do you look for as the 
fruit of your labors, — a new Gospel? 

C. Perhaps nothing new. Perhaps a clearer 
understanding and a firmer grasp of the old. 

A. But is the Christian faith, in any sense, to 
be put on trial ? Is everything to be regarded 
as merely provisional until you have finished 
your inquiries and declared the result ? And, 
as coming ages will hardly accept your finding 
as authoritative and final, are the souls of men 
to be fed for ever upon inquiries instead of 
truth ? Is the Lord and Redeemer of men 
come, or do you look for another, or don't you 
know whether you look for another or not ? I 
should like to know where you are going to 
stand while you try the old foundations. 

C. The patent facts of human life and history 
are not to be questioned. The place of Chris- 



20 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

tianity at the head of the spiritual progress of 
mankind is a simple matter of fact. Christianity- 
has no serious competitor on the face of the 
earth. The thought of displacing it cannot 
enter a human head which is not either blind 
or greatly bewildered. Christianity is obviously 
the dispensation of the fulness of times. Our 
difficulty is to distinguish between the essential 
and the accidental in what has been handed 
down to us as Christianity. I feel at liberty to 
discuss without reserve every question of detail, 
because I am fully persuaded that the central 
question of the place and future of Christianity 
is for ever beyond discussion, except for men 
who are prepared to destroy the temple of 
history and to raise it up again from the 
foundations without the actual materials. But 
if our manner of approaching the subject seems 
to you to recognize and tolerate doubt too 
much, there is another way of proceeding which 
will suit us just as well, and perhaps be more 
free from offence to you. Instead of examin- 
ing our doubts, let us make a confession of our 
faith. Let us see what we do believe without 
wavering. 

A. That certainly can be done without 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 21 

offence : and, so far as I am concerned, it is 
done quickly. My faith is the simple faith of 
my fathers ; and I seek no better form of con- 
fession than the old creed — " I believe in God 
the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and 
earth ; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our 
Lord." If you will say this creed with me, we 
can confess our faith together with little ado : 
if you cannot, then I certainly shall not care to 
follow you in quest of any other faith. 

B. I also am quite prepared to say that, if we 
cannot retain this faith, I care little about any 
other. But it is a wonder to me that you find 
it so easy to mount the lofty stairs of that 
glorious creed. It does not seem right that 
you should find it quite so easy. It appears to 
me that keeping the faith should require some 
high endeavor, some earnest wrestling ; and 
that he who keeps it to the end may well say 
that he has fought a good fight. 

A. You are quite right. Keeping the faith 
is a great duty. But it is to be done by stead- 
fastness, not by argumentation. And by stead- 
fastness, please God, I will keep it to the end. 
Thomas said, " I will not believe" ; and many 
still say the same without rebuke. Why should 



22 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

not I also be wilful in a better cause ? If there 
are two sides, as there surely must be, I will 
take the side of faith, and there abide. 

C. Blessed are they that have not seen, and 
yet have believed ! We will not ask you to be 
a partner to our doubts in any wise. But do 
not give us up. Watch us, and when we seem to 
you more erratic than usual, lift up your warn- 
ing voice. The steady resistance of a friend's 
unquestioning faith is a great safeguard in 
religious speculation. 

B. We can hardly do any kind of justice to 
the subject to-night. Can we not meet some 
day soon and devote a few quiet hours to this 
matter? I have often given entire days to mat- 
ters which interested me far less. 

C. My eldest boy celebrates his thirteenth 
birthday to-morrow. He expects the children 
of both of you to spend the day with him. If 
you two will also come and bring your wives 
with you, it will make the celebration quite 
imposing, and we can doubtless make room for 
a little theology in the course of the day. 

B. That will suit me perfectly. Brother A, 
you also can spare the time, can you not ? 
A. I should like to honor the boy's birthday ; 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 23 

but I have already heard more than I can carry 
of your theology. 

After some further talk, not bearing directly 
on the subject of these papers, the friends 
parted for the night, without a clear under- 
standing whether A would join the party on 
the morrow or not. 



II. 



When B arrived at C's house, he was afraid 
that he had come too early for the conveni- 
ence of the family ; and it was with no small 
relief that he found A and C waiting for him 
in the little reading-room upstairs, a room 
memorable to C as the scene of many hot de- 
bates with principalities and powers as well as 
with himself. A had been there an hour or 
more. B laughed as he entered, and, just bow- 
ing to his host, he shook hands playfully with 
A, and the conversation began and proceeded 
nearly as follows : 

B. I am glad to see that you are eager for bat- 
tle. I was somewhat afraid that C and I would 
have to set our faces against each other and fight 
a tedious duel all day, or patch up a peace and 
devote the day to relaxation and feasting. 

A. My wife wanted to come with the chil- 
dren ; and I thought that I might as well 
come and hear what you have to say. But I 

24 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 25 

am not eager for battle. You can have your 
tedious duel yet. I shall sit here at my ease 
and watch the fray. And, judging from your 
drift last night and on many former occasions, 
I think I shall be quite willing to see you 
mangle and maul one another as barbarously 
as possible. I pray that each of you may 
have the victory, and that neither may show 
any mercy. Raze each other's strongholds to 
the ground. Plough up their foundations, and 
sprinkle them with salt. 

C. We have apparently every preparation 
for a great struggle excepting the first and 
most essential of all, a just cause of war. We 
have no real quarrel to settle. We live in the 
same world, with the same faculties, and the 
same hopes and fears. The facts of human 
life and history are the same for us all, and 
the thoughts of our hearts are the same. The 
questions between us are simply, whether we 
shall turn and look at our own thoughts or not, 
and, if we do, which of those thoughts shall 
preoccupy the mind and govern the order of 
all the rest. As it seems to me, we have not 
come to a battle-field at all, but to a sort of 
singing-school, to see if we cannot sound a 



26 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

common keynote and sing together harmoni- 
ously the divine old song which we all love 
best of any. But let us begin. " I believe in 
God," is the first article of our creed. Can we 
all say that together without any discord ? 

B. We can say it together doubtless ; but I 
am not sure that we should all mean the same 
by it. What we desire, I presume, is not to 
find vague words which we can all say together, 
every one attaching to them his own private 
interpretation, but to find for our familiar 
words a definite meaning in which we can all 
heartily unite. 

A. And, pray, what will be the good of 
uniting in your meaning, if it is a meaning 
which you must hunt for, and a meaning 
which you seek for the express purpose of 
uniting irreconcilables ? The creed of the 
church of Christ has not been waiting all 
this while for a meaning. It has a mean- 
ing. And if you cannot accept the creed 
in its natural and well-known intention, the 
next best thing that you can do is to leave it 
alone. The Christian world will always use 
the creed in its old sense ; and if you unite 
with them in words, but with some new sense 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 2 J 

of your own, it is a kind of Ananias and Sap- 
phira business that I have no wish to be mixed 
up with. 

B. Bear with me. I do not wish to depart 
from the received meaning. I only wish to see 
clearly what it is, and why it is received ; that 
we may, if possible, all receive it together. 
And you are the very man to help me. You 
believe in God. If I ask for the grounds of 
your belief, you will refer me, after the manner 
of our manuals, to the works of creation, the 
conscience of man, the history of the world, 
and the Holy Scriptures. Do these various 
witnesses testify precisely the same in matter 
and in amount ? Or do they supplement, as 
well as confirm, one another? Assuming the 
latter, would you say that God is not revealed 
in the works of nature, or in the conscience of 
man, or in the history of the world, or in the 
Holy Scriptures, separately, but only in all of 
these together? 

A. God is partly revealed in every one of 
the ways you have mentioned, but not wholly 
revealed in any of them, or in all of them to- 
gether. He cannot be wholly made known 
to our finite capacity. 



28 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

B. The revelation of God to us, then, is con- 
ditioned or measured by the various means of 
revealing Him and by our capacity to receive 
revelation. Both this capacity and the means 
of revelation vary greatly with times and with 
individuals. A patriarch's belief in God, then, 
would differ from the belief of an apostle, and 
the belief of an aged Christian ripe for glory is 
far other than the belief of a child still in the 
nursery. Yet you will doubtless maintain that 
they might all unite without hesitation in say- 
ing " I believe in God." 

A. You are confounding belief in God with 
knowledge of God. Knowledge is variable, and 
should grow from more to more ; but the same 
belief may attend every stage of knowledge. I 
have believed in your existence these thirty 
years. I believed as strongly thirty years ago as 
I do now. Then, I knew next to nothing about 
you ; now, I know about all there is to know 
perhaps. Just so your patriarchs and your 
apostles, your Christians of four and of fourscore 
years, differ greatly in their knowledge of God, 
but they agree in their belief in His existence. 

B. Your distinction between knowledge and 
belief is very fine. Splitting a hair is nothing 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 29 

to it. So far as I can see, your belief in my 
existence thirty years ago was simply the 
knowledge (little it might be) which you had 
of me then ; and your exhaustive knowledge 
of me to-day is simply your belief in my exist- 
ence as I now appear to you. My question 
about the first article of the creed is just this : 
does it profess a belief in God as God is revealed 
by all available means to confirmed Christians ? 
If it does, many among us are necessarily 
debarred from the use of it. If it does not 
require so much, how much does it re- 
quire ? Is there a fixed definable minimum 
of belief or knowledge that will satisfy it? 
None of us have the full idea of God. None of 
us, therefore, can believe in Him fully. For 
how can we believe in Him except so far as we 
have heard or conceived of Him ? How much 
of the idea of God must we apprehend and 
believe in before we can say with the Christian 
church that we believe in God ? Then, further, 
the strength of belief varies as much as its sub- 
stance. Supposing your own idea of God and 
mine to be precisely the same, your belief in 
God, as we both conceive of Him, may be a 
lively unhesitating triumphant assurance ; mine 



30 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

may be a timid wavering acquiescence only 
just above the line of actual disbelief. Have 
I a right to stand by your side and say with 
you " I believe in God " ? 

A. You have a right to believe, and then to 
say that you believe. You would hardly desire 
the right to say "I believe," before you do 
believe, or before you know whether you believe 
or not. And yet you seem to be anxious to 
prepare the way to introduce the loose agnostic 
rabble into the household of faith, and so to 
take away all meaning from religious belief. 

C. I should like to seethe household of faith 
increase and multiply, but not so as to be re- 
duced to meanness and beggary thereby. Your 
rule seems to leave open no way of increase 
except by special creation of mature believers. 
You cannot consistently teach your creed to 
your children, and you dare not invite the 
multitude to worship with you. A man who 
should say, " I believe, Lord, help my unbelief," 
would seem to you a loose agnostic trespasser ; 
and even the prayer, " Increase our faith," 
might awaken suspicion. If creeds are good for 
anything, they ought to be good for educa- 
tional purposes, and the Church, sure that they 



Prayer-Meeting Theology. 31 

express truth which is true for all men and with 
which all men's better nature must be in secret 
sympathy, should not guard the use of them 
too strictly, but should encourage all who are 
at all so disposed to throw themselves upon 
them for expression and for confirmation and 
guidance. If this be done, many will say, " I 
believe in God," while, intellectually, belief 
and unbelief are almost evenly balanced in their 
minds, and many too, whose idea of God is 
utterly incapable of definition. The humble 
and meek will confess their faith in God from 
very humility, the young from reverence for 
parents and teachers and the great past. Their 
belief in God is an inheritance ; and, if analyzed, 
will be found to have little clearness of thought 
and little strength of conviction, but much 
natural piety. Shall we recognize such a belief, 
or must we insist on something clearer and 
stronger? 

A. We are not called upon to judge the 
faith of others, or to determine the mini- 
mum of faith that can be called Christian. 
Neither are we to be hampered in the work of 
Christian instruction and training by scruples 
and speculations concerning the beginnings of 



32 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

faith. All beginnings involve mysteries past 
rinding out, the beginnings of faith no less than 
any others. We may not forbid little children 
to confess their Lord, though they should con- 
fess Him from filial reverence alone ; and we 
must rejoice when others approach Him though 
they approach Him with doubt and difficulty. 
But you cannot plead the privileges of infancy 
in behalf of men and women of all ages ; and 
it is trifling to cite the indistinctness and feeble- 
ness of faith at its first awakening in justifica- 
tion of a faith which goes stumbling and falling 
all the way to old age and the bed of death. 
The child is not to be a child for ever. And 
Christian believers must not tarry too long at 
the birth. By the sure impulse of our new 
life we must ever seek not the minimum but 
the maximum of faith. We must move, not 
backward to the rudiments, but onward to 
perfection. We have no interest in defining a 
minimum. The full Christian faith is what is 
set forth, and what we profess to believe, in 
the creed : not that we have fathomed its 
depths or measured all its fulness, but that we 
are persuaded that it is, throughout, worthy of 
all acceptation, and that we press forward 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 33 

sincerely to a perfect faith. Regarding the 
creed thus as including the whole Christian 
faith, we all have need to breathe, with' each 
pregnant article, the deep prayer, " Help my 
unbelief ! " 

C. But we are straying very far from the 
question before us. We proposed to ascertain 
the definite sense of the first article of the 
creed; and here we are discussing nothing less 
than the whole creed and the entire Christian 
faith. Do you intend to say that when a man 
declares his faith in God, he either actually 
means or necessarily ought to mean, that he 
accepts the whole Christian faith ? 

A. We were not talking about a man at 

large declaring merely his faith in God. I 

could not venture to guess what such a man 

might mean by his declaration. We were 

speaking of Christians and of the Apostles' 

Creed, and, first of all if so it please you, of the 

first article of the creed. Now, no Christian 

believer ever thinks of the first article as if it 

stood alone. The Christian's belief in God the 

Father implies his belief in the only-begotten 

Son. It is through the Son that he comes to 

the Father. It is through believing in Christ 
3 



34 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

that he believes in God in the Christian sense, 
which surely is the proper sense of the creed. 
The "first article of the creed, therefore, though it 
maybe spoken alone, cannot be believed alone. 

C. If we should take that view of the matter, 
our whole inquiry would be greatly modified. 
But let us fall back on what we all admit, that 
we have not fathomed the depths or measured 
all the fulness of the idea of God ; that much 
of the real truth concerning Him must be left 
out in all our discussions ; that as a matter of 
fact there is a very great difference in the 
actual thoughts of those who sincerely seek 
Him. Admitting this, let us turn to the various 
witnesses which have been mentioned, and see 
what and how much belief in God they will 
respectively help us to. 

A. These witnesses have been testifying 
since the world began. Their separate testi- 
monies, hard to be grasped in the brief bust- 
ling life of the individual and even in the 
longer life and wider experience of nations, 
have coalesced and penetrated slowly into the 
mind and heart of mankind ; but that, as 
Christians believe, not without the aid of the 
great mysteries of the Incarnation and the Res- 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 35 

urrection, and the Coming of the Holy Ghost. 
You propose to set aside this long result, this 
greatest birth, of time, and do over again, bare- 
handed in a couple of hours, the most serious 
work of God and man through all ages. Com- 
pared with the shocking presumption and con- 
summate absurdity of such an undertaking, it 
would be reasonableness itself for you one of 
these long summer days to fall a calculating 
and to re-discover the law of gravitation ; and 
then, after refreshing your exhausted powers 
by a pleasant trip in Europe, to fit up a crazy 
old-fashioned little fleet and re-open the history 
of our hemisphere by discovering America. It 
is easy to pretend to go back to the beginning 
and hear the witnesses for yourselves. No 
doubt you have the whole mass of evidence 
summed up after some choice fashion in your 
own heads already ; and this going back is a 
happy contrivance to furnish momentum for 
your adopted views, whatever they may be. 
You cannot truly go back to the beginning, 
or anywhere near the beginning. And if you 
could, you would not get as far on your way 
again in your whole lifetime as you propose 
to go this morning at an easy canter. 



36 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

C. I admit very readily that hearing the 
witnesses and summing up the evidence is the 
slow work of ages. But when you have both 
the original evidence and the long-prepared 
summary before you, you may verify and 
weigh rapidly. If you had studied mathe- 
matics as long as you have been reading the- 
ology, you could follow the argument of the 
Principia with all becoming modesty ; and 
there is nothing very presumptuous in tracing 
the voyages of Columbus on the map whether 
you have ever tasted salt water or not. Our 
proposed task is of the like humble character. 
Let us turn to the first witness, the material 
universe. What does it say of God ? What 
have the ages made of its teaching ? And how 
much of it can we receive ? 

A. You will have your own way of course. 
But I cannot help feeling that it is child's 
play of the vainest sort. The witnesses for 
God are many. But God Himself is not a 
bundle of parts to be verified separately and 
then put together. God is one: and He must 
be known as One before we can appreciate the 
contributions of the several witnesses. The 
testimony of external nature cannot be got at 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 37 

by itself. He that hath the knowledge of God 
will receive more and more from nature at 
every turn. But he that looks for God in 
nature alone will not find Him. I have heard 
of a place in the mountains where great echoes 
will answer every voice and reverberate in 
tones of thunder all round the sky. But those 
great peaks, endowed as they are with Titanic 
voices, will not utter a sound for one who 
merely stands still to listen. The traveller, 
with his own voice, must furnish the theme 
and waken the music. In like manner your 
faith in God must waken nature's hymn of 
praise, must kindle the true light of nature, 
which in turn will declare the glory of God 
to you and mightily confirm and increase your 
faith. Let me add that the great witnesses of 
God not only testify together, but also speak 
for the most part in a still small voice to the 
inner man, to the inmost man of all ; and 
that, not chiefly in hours of speculation and 
study, but in the ordinary course and experi- 
ence of life, and without cross-examination on 
our part. When, in our self-sufficiency, we 
turn upon the witnesses and examine them 
magisterially, we really turn a deaf ear to their 



38 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

teaching and drown their great message in our 
own clamor. 

B. I have at times been disposed to think 
that the testimony of nature was overestimated 
in divinity. But I may have to champion 
nature after all if you reduce her testimony to 
an inarticulate mumbling which must have a 
sense imposed upon it rather than derived 
from it. You make nature very much such a 
witness as Tony Lumpkin, well capable of 
swearing to anything in the evidence of others, 
but too stupid to furnish independent testi- 
mony. If all the other witnesses are as help- 
less as this one, what will become of them ? 
Must they sit together in eternal silence wait- 
ing for one another to begin ? Or can they 
work a miracle, and, by contributing nothing 
apiece, make up together a glorious and con- 
vincing array of evidence ? We may as well 
let nature alone if all she can give is but the 
echo of our own thoughts. To be of any 
account, she ought to be independent of our 
moods. She ought to give her testimony un- 
ceasingly both when we wake and when we 
sleep. And, depend upon it, nature will give 
independent evidence on the one side or on 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 39 

the other. Your moderation or caution, or 
whatever it may be, will only serve to hand 
the witness over to the other side. Then, 
again, I must protest against your inner and 
inmost revelations. I fully acknowledge the 
limitations of our understanding, and also the 
high and sacred character of the revelations 
made to man in divers ways. But we must 
try the spirits and cross-examine the witnesses ; 
we must think and speak of all these things in 
the best way we can, or confess that our reli- 
gious life is an ordinance of fate and not a 
reasonable service at all. 

A. I did not intend to say that nature gives 
no independent testimony, but that her testi- 
mony makes complete sense to us only in con- 
nection with what is revealed in other ways. 
She furnishes what is not furnished elsewhere: 
but what she furnishes will only astonish and 
perplex and even mislead, if taken alone. 
There is, however, no need of taking it alone. 
We are not sent empty and naked into the 
presence of external nature ; and it is insolent 
presumption to go naked and empty-handed 
into her presence unsent. You say that the 
enemy will use nature for his evil purpose. I 



40 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

doubt it not. It will be easy for him to do so. 
I shall not dispute with him about the bare 
works of nature, and the awful desolation of 
their silence or the duplicity of their speech. 
I say we must seek the key to nature else- 
where than in nature herself. The telescope 
is not the ultimate key to the heavens, nor the 
hammer to the rocks, nor the dredging-net to 
the deep sea. God must be known before His 
works can be understood. When you know 
Him, nature will teach you more about Him 
every day. He will appear to you on every 
mount, under every tree stand visible, and talk 
with you familiarly at every fountain. 

B. How comfortably you hover in the thin 
Miltonic air ! I can but envy you, as a creep- 
ing thing might envy a bird. Brother C, can 
you say anything to bring natural theology a 
little nearer to one who must rest his clumsy 
feet on ground that can be touched ? 

C. I would not say that nature reveals God 
to us as a being wholly outside of herself, but 
that God reveals Himself in nature by His 
actual presence therein. Nature is not so 
much a proof of the being of God as a direct, 
though very imperfect, manifestation of God 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 41 

Himself. I do not, from what I see, infer that 
there is a God somewhere ; but I see, I feel, I 
believe that God is here. I do not conclude 
that there is a being corresponding to a name 
and a thought which I had before ; but I feel 
that the being which I find everywhere fills and 
overflows all the highest names ever fashioned 
and the highest thoughts ever conceived, and 
urges the soul to new thoughts and to ever- 
growing adoration. I do not merely believe that 
God is ; I believe that what most truly is, what 
is original and substantial and abiding, is God. 
I would seek, not to ascertain whether a cer- 
tain indefinable problematical entity is or is 
not, but to know better day by day that which 
certainly and obviously is, that which besets 
me behind and before, that from which I can- 
not flee though I dwell in the uttermost parts 
of the sea and though I seek every covering of 
darkness, that whereby all things stand and in 
which I myself live and move and have my 
being. I would start not with what I seek but 
with what I find. It is true that we have the 
idea and the name of God taught us very early ; 
but we have the reality before us, more or 
less truly known and more or less deeply felt, 



42 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

earlier still. We are cast upon Him from 
the womb. 

A. I understand you to say that nature is 
God ; and I expect to see you presently fall 
down and worship the sun and the moon, the 
heavens and the earth and the sea, and all 
that therein is. 

C. The term nature is frequently used by 
distinguished men in a sense which might 
almost justify the statement that nature is God. 
But we are plain people, and we must not 
renounce our every-day language, even when 
we presume to talk theology. With this un- 
derstanding I say : No, I did not intend to say 
that nature is God. But I meant to say that 
we do not have to go through a double pro- 
cess, first examining nature, and then reaching 
the conclusion that there is a God. We do 
not have to go through nature up to nature's 
God on the farther side. God is as near as 
nature. He is on this side of nature as well as 
on the other. Nature is but a visible token of 
the actual presence and operation of the in- 
visible God. And this partly accounts for the 
confusion in the use of the term nature. We 
all perceive the forms and movements of the 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 43 

material world, and we often call them nature. 
But we are just as truly and just as directly 
aware of the unseen power working in and 
through these forms and movements as we are 
of the forms and movements themselves ; and 
we frequently include this unseen power with 
the familiar phenomena under the one term, 
nature. Now this power, of which we are all 
aware in nature, is not an argument for the 
being of God ; it is God Himself. Nature will 
conduct you to no other, will prove the being 
of no other. Of course you can prompt nature 
if you wish, and make her seem to say what- 
ever you choose. But nature needs no prompt- 
ing to reveal the ever-living, ever-present God. 
Her own voice is God's voice. Her power is 
Himself. Even her silent visible forms bring 
Him distinctly face to face with our spirits. It 
is not to the dread and sovran Blanc alone that 
we might say : 

" I gazed upon thee, 
Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, 
Didst vanish from my thought : entranced in prayer 
I worshipped the Invisible alone." 

The Invisible comes to us thus directly in 
all visible things. Even in darkness He passes 



44 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

solemnly before us, and He looks forth upon 
our awe-struck souls from what seem the void 
desert spaces of the universe. We must desire 
to know much more of God than is thus revealed 
in nature ; and when we come to know more, 
nature will not contradict our new knowledge, 
but, being entirely in harmony with it, will 
seem to contain it. Meanwhile, there is that 
which all men must more or less distinctly 
know of God, even His eternal power and 
Godhead. God in nature, though veiled, is 
face to face with all His reasonable creatures. 
He is not testified to merely, but He it is that 
speaketh unto us and unto all. 

A. I thought we were coming to this, to a 
God known and believed in by unbelievers. A 
little while ago we labored hard and could 
scarcely say clearly that we believed in God. 
It required wrestling, it was a good fight, to 
keep the faith. But now no one can help 
believing. No fighting or squirming will avail 
to rid any one of his faith. My friend B, you 
must be very tired, clinging so desperately and 
so long to your faith while the cruel flood was 
tearing it away from you bit by bit. But you 
may rest now and be comforted. The wicked 



Prayer- Meeting TJieology. 45 

flood has turned round. It will restore your 
stolen faith to you with interest, and perhaps 
dash it in your face if you are not careful. 
Faith will no longer be scarce on the earth. It 
will hardly be scarce enough to be precious. 
The returning flood will deposit it all over the 
land thicker than the river of Egypt deposits 
mud. Henceforth no one can fall short of 
blessedness through unbelief ! 

C. The directness of the revelation does not 
make unbelief impossible ; but it helps to make 
it inexcusable. The presence of God in nature 
is necessarily felt by all men, but it is not neces- 
sarily welcomed and heeded. Faith is not the 
mere perception or feeling of what is offered 
to the spirit of man in nature, but the frank 
and hearty recognition and acceptance of it. 
There are revelations of God besides that in 
external nature, and every one of them affords 
opportunities for deadly unbelief. But with 
every form of revelation, the great trial of faith 
is not in the question of fact, whether there be 
a God or not, but in the practical question, 
whether, brought face to face with God, we 
shall glorify the known and felt reality as God 
and acknowledge Him in all our ways, while a 



46 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

chorus of siren voices would seduce us to turn 
away from Him and to worship and serve the 
creature more than the Creator. Unbelief in 
this practical sense is much more inexcusable 
if the being of God be not a matter of argu- 
ment but of immediate manifestation, as I take 
it to be in nature. With your great fear of 
consorting with unbelievers I have no sympathy. 
I am glad to have some religious ground in 
common with all mankind. The foundation of 
our theology ought to be so broad and sure that 
none but "the fool" can dispute its validity. 
If you only find an argument for the being of 
God in nature, and much more if you find 
nothing of God except what you bring with 
you, you will find yourself the unbeliever in a 
large and earnest household of faith. Students 
of nature and the general mass of men will 
accept what they find face to face with them in 
nature as unquestionably divine. This will be 
their God, and will receive divine honors of 
some kind. If you insist that the actual power 
in nature is only an argument for the being of 
God, all that can be said is that the argument, 
like Prospero's brother, has been allowed to oc- 
cupy so large a place in the eyes of the people 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 47 

that the people can hardly be blamed for assign- 
ing to it the chief dignity. If God is not to be 
found here directly, then that which is to be 
found can hardly be dispossessed of the faith 
and reverence of mankind. Men will not 
believe that the mighty presence of which they 
are aware is not that of the Highest. And if 
you dissent, your remaining task will be, not so 
much to prove the being of your God as to 
find room and work for Him in the world and 
in the minds of men. 

B. But you could easily make room for Him 
and for a dozen more, as you seem to have no 
objection to unlimited Polytheism. For the 
God which you so readily find at hand without 
any process of thought is, to say the least, a very 
heathenish God, a Pantheon in Himself, with 
the most diverse forms and the most mixed 
attributes, and without any name by which He 
can be approached. He is not only Jehovah, 
Jove, or Lord, but Briareus or Typhon, Osiris, 
Isis, Orus, The One, The All, Anything, Every- 
thing under the sun. Is it any gain to be able 
to find God directly in nature if the God you 
find has no distinct character, but repeats, in 
his awful multifarious self, all the varying and 



48 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

perplexing aspects of natural phenomena, not 
only the sublime and the beautiful and the 
beneficent, but also the foul, the deformed, and 
the horrible? The power in nature is a de- 
stroyer as well as a creator, a power of death 
and darkness as well as of light and life. 

C. Nature has perplexing aspects. But these 
aspects trouble us only when we lose sight of 
her ineffable greatness, when we fasten on sin- 
gle features or acts and ignore the expression 
and movement of the whole. Nature is so 
great and so glorious that what seems most hor- 
rible in her work fails to mar her beauty or to 
disturb our deep, confiding affection for her. 
Even when we fret ourselves the most because 
of her stern work, we turn to her instinctively 
for consolation, and we find it. She quiets our 
plaints and subdues our murmurings, she 
soothes and awes us into content, without 
changing or explaining her course. Her per- 
plexing aspects, without disappearing, are over- 
shadowed by her majesty. And if this is true 
of nature, it is also true of Him who is her 
life. He is too great not to be adored and 
trusted, though He slay us. " O Lord my God, 
thou art very great ; thou art clothed with 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 49 

honor and majesty. Bless the Lord, O my 
soul." It is a satisfaction to find God directly 
in nature, though to our immature and guilty 
minds He should at first appear multifarious 
and heathenish and terrible. It is better to find 
Him, though He seem fiercer than ten furies, 
than to find no reality at all, but only mysteri- 
ous hints and indefinite probabilities. Once 
we meet the living God, we know that He is 
the First and the Last, in whose power we are, 
and with whom now and for ever we have to 
do ; in the knowledge of whom, if He will deign 
to reveal Himself more fully unto us, we may 
find the light of life ; and in humble submission 
to whom, at all events, must lie our only hope. 
But a vague abstraction, vouched for by mere 
arguments, would be as deaf and unapproach- 
able as Baal, and of no value even to the moles 
and the bats. 

B. But are you sure that all men, that stu- 
dents of the physical sciences especially, do 
really find in nature this power, or life, which 
you would identify with the God of the creed ? 
I had an impression that scientific inquiry 
tended strongly to resolve the whole universe 
into mere material atoms and modes of motion, 



50 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

and that blank atheism was really " the religion 
of all men of science." 

C. We did not start out to-day to be our 
brother's keepers, or to provide a faith for all 
the world, though I should rejoice if such a 
faith were found. We wished rather to ponder 
the path of our own feet through the abyss 
of religious speculation, which sometimes 
threatens to swallow us up. I am sure that I 
find in nature very much more than forms and 
movements. I am sure also that to ordinary 
people round about me the unseen power is as 
real, as obvious, and as impressive as to myself. 
My acquaintance with scientific men is not ex- 
tensive. But I have an impression that, on the 
whole, they are, in this respect, much like other 
people. I have indeed known some of them 
who rejected the Christian faith, and professed 
that they did not believe in God. But they 
were pious votaries of nature, and they trans- 
ferred to her without stint the attributes and 
functions of the discredited Deity. If there be 
others, who, in their fundamental thought, ut- 
terly and consistently repudiate all belief in 
God, what of it ? Their denial of God is not to 
be accounted for by their superior knowledge ; 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 51 

for no one can pretend that they know any more 
than their fellow-students, who continue either 
to worship God in nature or to glorify nature 
as God. And even if all competent students of 
the physical sciences agreed in declaring that 
there is nothing at all in existence but material 
forms and modes of motion, would there be any 
reason why any sane layman should believe 
them, when they go so recklessly beyond their 
depth? Because a man has spent his life in 
turning some particular products of nature in- 
side out, or in brewing and boiling strange con- 
coctions, must we all humbly consult him about 
the general significance of the universe? And 
must we despair if he swears by his cauldron 
that there is nothing in being which he has not 
boiled and baked at his pleasure? Have we not 
ourselves lived in close converse with nature all 
our days, playing with her in childhood, and 
working with her incessantly through our adult 
years ? We have beheld her with the naked eye 
more than through telescopes and microscopes, 
it is true ; and we have looked in her face much 
more than into her entrails. But why should 
any microscopic divination with her inward 
parts be supposed to furnish true knowledge of 



52 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

her ultimate significance if the most intimate 
communion with her face to face for a lifetime 
be wholly illusory? No doubt there is very 
much to learn by special studies of nature. But 
is not the mass of scientific knowledge open to 
all the world ? Are the decisive results of sci- 
entific investigation locked up in the possession 
of the investigators alone ? While we delight 
to honor great specialists in their own proper 
departments, we need not regard them as infal- 
lible popes in the more general interpretation 
of nature. Their particular aptitudes and their 
special labors may be a disqualification rather 
than an advantage in the more open field. A 
little child shall often lead the wisest of them. 
And the great poets will ever speak for nature 
to mankind with more authority than all the 
scientific schools together, because the poets 
speak for the mind and heart of man as well as 
for the bare facts of the external world. 

B. But, granting the manifest existence of 
some vast power in nature, does not the doctrine 
of evolution, now generally accepted, reduce it 
to a formless, purposeless, mindless monstrosity, 
altogether unlike any of the greater gods, not 
to speak of the holy name on which we call ? 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 53 

C. Just now we wish to deal only with the 
actually present, with the known, with the 
certain. The manifest power in nature belongs 
to this category; and I find nothing in it un- 
worthy of the supreme and ever-blessed God. 
Your theory of evolution goes on a dark jour- 
ney "into the far backward and abyss of time," 
through probable, possible, improbable, and 
perchance impossible things. It is well to ex- 
plore those remote and shadowy regions with 
all the resources of keen conjecture and daring 
hypothesis. But many of us have no vocation 
to join the explorers or even to estimate their 
achievements. I, at least, must dwell at home, 
while others face the dangers and divide the 
spoils of the great enterprise. I shall always 
welcome any clear and certain tidings which 
may reach us from the heroes of the expedition. 
But no possible tidings from them can be of 
much practical consequence to me, who am 
myself every moment face to face with the 
ever-living, ever-present God, with whom I 
have to do, and by whose grace my path in 
life is made sufficiently plain before me. When 
bold navigators sail for the northern seas, we 
heartily bid them God-speed ; we admire their 



54 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

courage and their seamanship ; and we look 
eagerly for news from them. But our interest 
in them and their work, though genuine enough, 
yields to the slightest call of commonplace du- 
ties at home. We lay down the volume contain- 
ing the thrilling account of their adventures 
when it is time to milk our cows or to feed our 
pigs. We live on in our old ways. We neither 
wind up our business nor sell our homesteads 
nor betray any premonition of great coming 
changes, whatever the news from the North. 
We are not going to live at the north pole 
whatever the heroes may find there ; and the 
north pole is not going to come any nearer 
to us than it was of yore. We honor heroic 
adventure, and we have a measure of curiosity 
about the well-guarded extremity of our planet 
and the picturesque approaches thereto ; but, 
when all is said, our cows and our pigs are 
more to us than all the wonders of the ice-fields. 
In due time, also, if it please God, the explorers 
themselves will return glutted with the arctic 
cold, to end their days in the humdrum pur- 
suits of the temperate zone. To me, your 
thoroughgoing theory of evolution, with its 
highly endowed eternal matter and its appall- 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 55 

ing rhythms and its all-embracing abstraction, 
has great interest of this remote, impractical, 
arctic-exploration kind, refreshing the mind 
and stimulating the imagination, but leaving 
the serious truth and work of life and the 
grand significance of nature precisely where 
they were before. 

B. Are those well considered words? Can you 
afford to make light of the progressive order 
in nature? And is it becoming to go out of 
your way, with far-fetched, long-drawn-out fig- 
ures, to disparage the greatest achievement of 
modern thought? 

C. I beg your pardon, I disparage nothing 
of the kind. If I disparage anything, it is that 
theory of evolution which you described as re- 
ducing the power in nature to a state unworthy 
of the reverence of mankind. And I do not 
disparage that as a speculation, or by any 
means ignore the wealth of knowledge and in- 
tellectual power which is expended upon it. 
But if you thrust it upon me as a practical 
doctrine, which I must seriously consider and 
which I must live by, I am simply stunned 
and cannot conceive which way my new doc- 
trine would have me go. If evolution, what- 



56 Prayer-Meeting Theology. 

ever it be, has brought all things, ourselves 
included, to their present state, then evolution 
has made man rational and religious, a wor- 
shipper of God, of a God found ever active in 
all nature. Is this same evolution now going 
to end like the famous king of France, who, 

"With four thousand men, 
Marched up the hill, and then marched down again " ? 

Having taught us to believe in God, will it 
now straightway teach us to deny Him ? That 
is a rhythm which will be broken whatever 
forces are engaged to carry it out. 

As to the progressive order in nature, we 
have no reason or inclination to disbelieve in it. 
We rejoice in the manifestation of it in the 
great scientific movement of the day. We be- 
lieve heartily in the doctrine of evolution when 
it is not carried beyond all bounds of science 
to serve the preconceived notions of a particu- 
lar school of thought. Some of the devoutest 
Christian philosophers of the past distinctly 
enunciated the idea of evolution before it be- 
came the dominant idea in the world's thought ; 
and the Christian philosophers of to-day teach 
it as impressively as any others. Our oldest 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 57 

and soundest theology implies evolution, the 
growing fulfilment of God's purpose in the 
world : and we are indebted to every theory 
which emphasizes and illustrates this great 
thought. To us, the thought, that " the pres- 
ent is big with the future," is most practical 
as well as most true. It is the spring of faith- 
ful work, and the support of lively and patient 
hope, as well as the wonder and delight of con- 
templation. Evolution, to us, makes nature 
declare the glory of God not less but more. 
Far from superseding God in nature, it is 
itself a manifestation of His all-pervading 
energy. In saying this I am not taking imper- 
tinent liberties with a scientific term and a 
scientific doctrine, of which I have no great 
right to speak. The ablest expounders and ad- 
vocates of the doctrine of evolution, Mr. Spencer 
in England and Mr. Fiske in our own country, 
certainly give us the right to regard the doc- 
trine, in its essential character and final out- 
come, as distinctly religious. Both of them 
represent it as more religious than our current 
Christian theism, — in fact, as the religious 
position, to which all others are but approxi- 
mations. We accept the doctrine as compati- 



58 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

ble with an earnest belief in God. When it is 
loaded with additions which make it, to our 
minds, utterly incompatible with such belief, 
we part with it : and we are profoundly con- 
vinced that the strictest science parts with it 
at the same point. 

A. I agree with you as to polar expeditions 
and the overloaded variety of evolution. But 
I fail to perceive wherein this great enterprise 
of ours to-day differs from them unless it be in 
not having even a remote scientific or specu- 
lative interest. For the goal of our inquiry 
seems to be the barren conviction that what is 
exists, and that what is absolutely certain is 
entirely incontrovertible. 

C. No, that is not our goal, but it is a truth 
well worth remembering. The goal is to de- 
termine some of the great truths that are 
certain, and to see how certain they are. We 
find in the bare contemplation of nature that 
something exists in or with all nature besides 
what the senses perceive; and that this some- 
thing is most august and worshipful, and of 
great power over the spirit of man from first to 
last. This may seem meagre as the direct con- 
tribution of nature to theology. But it is a 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 59 

sure starting-point, and it leaves the way open 
for further advance. Nature, in the sense in 
which we have spoken of it, is but a small part 
of all that is, and it cannot be regarded as the 
most important part. It is but the stage and 
apparatus, not the persons and the drama. 
Yet we already find the chief actor on the 
stage, though his character and purposes are in 
a large measure left to be unveiled as the play 
goes on. Nature leaves ample room for more 
truth than she discovers ; she points signifi- 
cantly to such further truth ; and she will con- 
firm and illustrate it when it is revealed. 

A. I have no doubt but you mean well. 
But you leave God and nature in a sad tangle. 
You seem willing to make a distinction ; but 
no one can tell what the distinction is to be, or 
where nature ends and God begins. You see 
the chief actor on the stage. Why do you not 
say that you see him in the stage, in every 
part of it, in the very shape of it, in the very 
space which surrounds it? That would agree 
better with your recent talk about God in 
nature. 

C. I have no objection to say so if confused 
rhetoric seems to you more persuasive than the 



60 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

simpler kind. The form of expression is of 
minor importance. The truth which I would 
emphasize is that God reveals Himself directly 
to us in nature, though the knowledge of Him 
which we receive through nature is very lim- 
ited. We find Him with us in nature some- 
what as a child finds his mother present with 
him in his infancy. What does the little one 
actually find? He finds a gentle and skilful 
hand ministering to him. He finds a soft, warm 
bosom to lie in. He hears cheery notes and 
sweet words. He sees a tall, mysterious figure 
with a beaming face bending over him. Are 
these his mother? Are these the whole of her 
motherhood ? These are about all he knows, 
and even these he knows dimly and confusedly. 
But he knows his mother in reality though not 
by name. He does not infer his mother from 
these things. He knows her truly and directly, 
but very imperfectly, in these things. The 
mother puts her thought and her love and all 
the treasure of a mother's heart in a kind look 
and in a tender touch. But how little of it all 
does the child know, though it is all there? He 
must learn in many ways long thereafter how 
much more than he knew was round about him 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 61 

in his infancy. In like manner God puts His 
whole self in the face and voice of nature for 
His children. The children find something of 
Him there, but not all that is there present. 
They must learn in other ways, with advancing 
life and experience, to recognize His holiness 
and His love. And when they have done so, 
they may well say : Did not our hearts burn 
within us while He looked upon us and spoke 
unto us in our childhood through the common 
sights and sounds of the world? 

A. I should like to hear what you have to 
say of the great arguments for the being of 
God from the necessity of a first cause, and 
from the indications of design in nature. 

C. Can it be that you desire to snare us and 
put us to confusion ? You thought we were 
incapable of any profitable discussion of the 
general question of the being of God. And 
now you invite us to commit ourselves on special 
lines of discussion, and those lines on which 
advanced thinkers of the day boast that they 
have routed the stoutest champions of the old 
faith. You would have us try our apprentice 
hands at arguments which have, in the opinion 
of many, become a by-word and a derision in 



62 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

the hands of Samuel Clarke and William Paley. 
I am free to say, however, that though I am 
familiar with the knowing and lofty contempt 
of Clarke and Paley so common in our day, I 
have never yet seen the refutation of their argu- 
ments. I have seen the statement that refuta- 
tion is not necessary ; that the progress of 
thought and knowledge has relegated the old 
arguments to a limbo so dark and so far away 
that it would be waste of time to refute them. 
But the smart air of such a statement does not 
save it from being exceedingly insignificant. 
The metaphysical necessity of a first cause or 
ground of existence, and the marvellous adjust- 
ments in nature which suggest design on the 
part of the first cause, are simple facts, as fresh 
and perennial as nature herself. The argument 
from these facts is simply the clear, strong, 
pointed statement of the facts themselves. The 
only possible refutation of the argument is the 
abolition of the facts. And the compassing of 
that refutation -will surely waste all the time 
that is devoted to it. But if we feel and ac- 
knowledge the actual presence of the first cause 
in nature, we need not dwell at length, for our 
own benefit, on the metaphysical necessity of 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 63 

it. The proof of design we must sometime con- 
sider, in part at least, because it consists in 
tracing the power, the thought, the will, the 
motive, in nature, in which we have her revela- 
tion of the attributes of her first cause. But 
we shall never get through the creed at this 
rate. The morning is passing, and we are 
leisurely playing around the first article. 

B. I already despair of getting much further 
than the first article to-day. But let us call the 
next witness. What contribution is made to 
our belief in God by the mind and life of man ? 
We have spoken of the mind of man as a wit- 
ness in addition to nature. But we can scarcely 
allow such language to be heard in Gath. The 
Philistines would mock at it. " What is the 
mind of man," they would ask, "but a part of 
nature?" I know that we are plain people, 
and that we must use the greatest plainness of 
speech. But is not the mind of man, by many 
around us, triumphantly made out to be but a 
portion of nature, even in the narrowest sense 
in which the every-day language can speak of 
nature ? The mind of man, then, has nothing 
of its own to give. And of what account are 
even its impressions of the outward world ? One 



64 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

portion of nature makes an impression upon 
another portion; that is all. One combination 
of atoms hits and thrills and kindles another 
combination. What can it signify? And what 
is there to save our highest possessions and our 
most aspiring hopes from being carried away 
to chaos by some unexpected unaccountable 
impulse? 

A. If that is the case, be content to gaze at 
the great show while it lasts. Or, if you are 
weary of it, turn away ; think no more about 
it ; let the atoms whirl. But you are a " com- 
bination " yourself forsooth, and you are cast 
helpless into the thick of the play. Your part 
is to take a vain show to heart, and vex your 
fortuitous soul about passing shadows. It is 
all an aimless, senseless phantasmagoria, man, 
and here you are, thinking and sorrowing and 
praying, as if life was real and as if we might 
live it in earnest ! I have heard with my ears 
about these atoms, and so have you ; but we 
have never seen them or known anything at all 
about them. Our thoughts we know, and they 
are far more real and fundamental than the 
atoms they are supposed to be made of. And 
be these thoughts made of whirling atoms or 



Prayer-Meeting Theology, 65 

be they the spiritual furniture and inheritance 
of heaven-born immortal souls, they are our 
chief concern. They are our truth. They are 
the real world we live in. 

C. And as to man's mind being a part of 
nature, it must at least be admitted that it is as 
good a part as any other. The sun gives light, 
the trees bear fruit, the mind of man yields 
thought. The light of the sun, the fruit of the 
trees, all genuine natural products, are related 
to the whole system of nature and honored and 
blessed therein. Are the thoughts and imag- 
inations of man spurious illegitimate abortions 
brought forth to perish ? Roots go down into 
the earth, and, searching in the dark, find the 
nourishment which they seek. Branches and 
leaves spread themselves out in their need, and 
find the air and the gladdening light for which 
they pant. Helpless little birds open their 
mouths wide, and they are filled. Natural 
tendencies and instincts are honored through- 
out the known world. Their guidance is sure, 
and the provision for them is ample and fit. 
Is the thought of man, if a natural product, the 
only one to be isolated and dishonored ? Or is 

it honored and prospered greatly in its lower 
5 



66 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

activities, to be dishonored utterly in its loftiest 
and most earnest flights ? I never felt disposed 
to quarrel with the people who insist on find- 
ing a place for man in nature. He would be a 
waif and estray indeed if no place were found 
for him there. The more surely his place there 
is made out, the more certain will it appear 
that his mind must correspond to reality in its 
religious impressions and cravings as well as in 
its other activities. If a mere shadow, or a 
wandering voice, syllabled God's name " on 
sands and shores and desert, wildernesses," it 
might be of no account. But if man, rising un- 
doubtedly from the depths of nature, with her 
sure marks on his body and mind alike, — if he, 
as his most characteristic, most earnest and 
persistent act, lifts up his eyes to heaven and 
cries out for the living God, then room must 
surely be found in nature for God as well as 
for man. 

B. Then nature is not God, but contains 
God. Does the lesser contain the greater, or 
how is it ? I am afraid we have ceased to be 
plain people speaking their simple unsophis- 
ticated vernacular. 

A. Never mind that : we have stuck to it 



Prayer-Meeting Theology. 67 

pretty well. If we sometimes slip into the 
freer idiom of our betters, I think we shall still 
be able to understand one another. 

B. Nay, if you two are going to be friends, 
what shall we not come to ? But you are build- 
ing too well for this low sphere. You leave no 
room in your world for vice and folly. And a 
mortal world without accommodations for 
them is but a castle in the air. Consider what 
some of our thoughts and tendencies are like ; 
and imagine a world in which all the thoughts 
and all the tendencies of all mankind find 
answering reality ! Many natural tendencies, 
so-called, are wholly unnatural ; and many 
swelling thoughts are utterly irrational and 
vain. If we are to attain truth, we must 
patiently bring our thoughts into agreement 
with reality rather than assume peremptorily 
that reality must correspond with our thoughts. 
We must hew the timber to the line, and not 
bend the line to the timber. 

C. We have idle, vagrant, lying thoughts, it 
is true ; and we have vicious, grovelling tend- 
encies. But the serious, sifted, enlightened, 
settled thought of man is true, is all the truth 
we can attain to; and the essential, abiding 



68 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

tendencies of the human mind must point to 
reality, or the system of nature, which we know 
to be sound at the base, is rotten at the top. 
The universal mind of man will have the power 
in nature to be divine, and will bow before it 
in awe and worship. There is plenty of room 
for difference, for error and superstition, in 
conceiving the character and attributes of God 
and the manner and spirit of the worship which 
should be offered to Him. But amid all such 
differences there remains the settled disposition 
to worship, to acknowledge dependence, and 
to seek grace. Individuals may protest against 
the worship which others offer, and may seem 
to direct their protest against all worship and 
all objects of worship. But in the very earn- 
estness of their protest there is already the 
promise of a higher faith and a nobler service. 
Those who would dethrone Jupiter would 
inaugurate a purer reign and institute a more 
spiritual worship. They would destroy the 
existing temple, but the spirit that is in them 
would, in three days, raise it up again higher 
and more glorious. If there are others whose 
protest is real and final against all worship and 
all faith, who say in their hearts with measured 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 69 

emphasis, " There is no God," we must ask 
who they are that they should set themselves 
against the hosts of their brethren. Are they 
the natural heads and leaders of the human 
race, and clearly entitled to subvert the faith 
of the millions by the weight of their personal 
authority? Far otherwise. In the disposition 
to worship, the unanimity of mankind has been 
so great, and the very strongest and loftiest 
minds have been so forward and hearty in it, 
that any individuals or classes standing aloof 
may well be presumed to be exceptional char- 
acters, defective in some true human quality, 
rather than examples of what human nature 
properly is. Brilliant gifts they may possess ; 
but they are the maimed, the halt, the blind, 
the crazy, nevertheless. They may do much 
good service in many ways ; but they are of no 
account in estimating the spiritual character of 
the race. Upon every reasonable estimate, man 
is found a worshipper. He does not wait to 
have the existence of God proved or explained 
to him. He falls down and worships at once. 
And after all the proving and explaining, he 
worships still. Yea, he sometimes worships 
after he has proved to himself that there is no 



yo Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

God. Worship is an essential and abiding ten- 
dency in the mind of the race ; and this fairly 
warrants the belief that the pervading power 
manifest in all nature is divine and worthy of 
man's true worship. 

B. I know not what opportunities you have 
had to observe universal man. But I am sur- 
prised at the confidence with which you pro- 
nounce him to be a worshipper. Have you 
considered the cannibals and all the low savages 
of the world ? But you have a place ready for 
them. You will not hesitate to lump all their 
millions together as the halt and the maimed, 
the exceptions, which are of no account. That 
seems high-handed. Yet I am not prepared 
myself to set up the cannibals, in opposition 
to the great religious nations, as examples of 
human nature pure and simple. So, let us 
allow what you say, and go on. There is a 
divine power in nature ; and the mind of man 
feels its presence and worships. But the mind 
of man is a part of nature, and the noblest part 
of it that we know. Is the divine power, mani- 
fest everywhere else in nature, manifest also in 
the mind of man? And can the mind perceive 
the divine presence in itself? If God is in 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. ji 

nature, He can hardly be confined to her 
lower parts. But if He is in the mind of man, 
is not that a better place to meet Him, and to 
know and worship Him, than among the trees 
of Eden or in the burning bush of the desert, 
or in any external phenomena ? 

C. It is good to meet Him everywhere. We 
may certainly meet Him within the mind. But 
we cannot, for that reason, dispense with the 
revelations which come from without. The 
garden and the bush, the heavens and the 
earth, act an indispensable part in the religious 
life of mankind. The mind needs outward 
expressions and diagrams to aid it in mastering 
its own thoughts ; and the revelation of God 
within would probably only overwhelm us in an 
abyss of mysticism without a corresponding 
external revelation. But God is present in the 
human mind, and man is aware of His presence 
there. Our consciousness of what we can dis- 
tinctly call our own mind is a mere point, if I 
may so speak. But we are aware of something 
present with us at that point, scarcely to be 
distinguished from ourselves there, but passing 
beyond us and commanding heights and depths 
of power and riches which are certainly not in 



72 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

us or of us. The very life of our minds is their 
contact and communion with this something 
which reaches beyond them and unites them 
with the universe of things actual and possible. 
We often have a sense of personal helplessness 
united with a confident reliance on invincible 
strength within. We are humble and yet 
highly exalted. When we are weak then we 
are strong. The poet, feeling his inability to 
treat his great theme worthily, invokes the aid 
of the heavenly muse. This is not always a 
poetical mannerism or a relic of heathen myth- 
ology. It sincerely betokens the consciousness 
which man has of a power within him, which is 
not himself, but to which he can call for aid, 
and by whose aid he may soar to unwonted 
heights. In meditation our minds, though 
active, are still and expectant, listening for the 
voice of the greater mind within. This greater 
mind within us, very manifest in our higher 
intellectual life, is still more manifest in our 
moral life ; more manifest because there it 
comes not into contrast merely, but into direct 
opposition to our meaner selves. We have 
inclinations and purposes and plans which are 
definite and strong and clearly our own. Yet 



Prayer-Meeting Theology, 73 

in our minds and hearts we are face to face with 
a higher purpose which awes and commands 
us, a purpose against which we struggle with 
violence and with guile, and from which we 
desperately seek to hide or escape, but which 
will not let us go, and in contrite and sincere 
submission to which we find our highest life. 
This commanding purpose within us cannot be 
the result of any pressure from without, such 
as the force of circumstances or the demands 
of society, for it sets us in sharp and perpetual 
conflict with circumstances, and it goes far 
beyond all outward requirements. It demands 
truth in the inward parts. It is a demand not 
from without but from within. Yet it is higher 
and purer than anything which we can call our- 
selves. It is the power present in all nature, 
present also here in the mind and heart 
of man. 

B. With light shadows must come. But this 
last light of yours seems to bring total eclipse. 
We had heard before that there is a divine 
power in nature, its glory and its very life, with- 
out which, if it could exist at all, nature would 
be a caput mortuum, fit only for burial. But 
now w r e find the presence of this divine power 



74 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

in the mind of man especially manifested by 
the presence there of another power in opposi- 
tion to it. Here then is something more than 
a corpse, and yet not God, and not even friendly 
to God. Here is life, here is power, independ- 
ent of God, and in actual conflict with Him. 
God is in us, but we ourselves resist Him. 
Whence have we the power to resist Him who 
is the life and power of all nature? Is God 
divided against Himself? You wish to reduce 
that which we can distinctly call our own mind 
to a mere point that you may enlarge the 
sphere of the divine energy. But beyond the 
point of self-consciousness in us there are 
heights and depths of power for evil as well as 
for good. The possibilities of evil are as un- 
fathomable as the possibilities of good, and as 
far removed from our present consciousness. 
Why should we call the better part God, and 
the worser ourselves ? We are fearfully and 
wonderfully made. Our mental and moral 
nature is a dark continent almost wholly unex- 
plored. If you say that our better nature is 
not ourselves but God, another may say, with 
equal plausibility, that our evil nature is not 
our own but Satan's. Then there is nothing 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 75 

left of our moral nature but the tiny point of 
consciousness wedged in between the hostile 
principalities. In like manner our intellectual 
being also is nullified. Our second thoughts are 
not our thoughts at all. Our better judgment 
is not our judgment. Meditation is consulting 
a hidden oracle. Calm reason and penetrating 
insight are divine inspiration. And all because 
we are not directly conscious of these subtle 
movements as originating wholly in our proper 
selves ; or, in other words, because we do not 
fully comprehend the mystery of our own 
being. The same reasoning will take our mem- 
ory from us, and place it in the keeping of 
some trustee or other. And so with our other 
faculties. The mind is to have no force of its 
own in reserve, and no stored wealth. It must 
live from hand to mouth a life of absolute de- 
pendence. Our moral and intellectual nature 
gone, the rest will speedily follow. What have 
we to do with our physical life ? It is the blood 
and the vital organs that do the business in 
their own way. In mind and body alike we 
are not ourselves at all, but mere pensioners 
and witnesses of the mystic powers which live 
our life and think our thoughts for us. 



76 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

C. Questions rise here, and all along our path, 
which belong to all ages, and which we may ask 
but cannot answer. But you overstate the dif- 
ficulty when you speak of a power independent 
of God and hostile to Him. Our resisting God 
is quite conceivable though there be but one 
power, and that His own, in the whole universe. 
Power may be lent and abused. Nothing is 
more common. As to the good and the evil 
inwardly present with us, I should not say that 
all the evil is our own any more than all the 
good. Neither have I any wish to reduce our 
human nature to a vanishing point. Our nature 
is vast enough, and capable of much good and 
evil of its own. But there is good present 
with us which is not related to us in the same 
way as the evil, whether the evil be wholly our 
own or the suggestion of an enemy. If the 
evil of the enemy dwells with us, it finds in us 
something congenial to which it attaches itself. 
We harbor it. We consent to it. We partake 
in it and become responsible for it. But the 
good abides with us when we violently oppose 
it. And when we consent to it and follow it, 
we can only follow afar off. It is ever with us, 
but it is never ours. It is in us, but it is not of 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. jj 

us. It is above us, and above all that we know 
or can conceive. It is the Highest. It is God. 
There is no reason why the presence of God 
within us, and our dependence upon Him, 
should be regarded as the nullification of any 
part of our being. As you have truly said, our 
physical life depends directly on much that is 
in no proper sense ourselves. Our individual 
nature has the most intimate relations with the 
great physical nature outside of us. The com- 
mon air is our breath of life. The fruit of the 
earth is our sustenance. Even our bodies are 
our own rather than ourselves. They are mere 
nature, only united with us by the wondrous 
bond of life. When life is withdrawn, the bodies 
are nature still, but ours no longer. We live 
physically, then, by the presence and operation 
of that which is not ourselves, by the presence 
and operation of common nature and her divine 
principle. This is a fact almost too obvious 
to mention. But who ever supposed that we 
are the less ourselves physically because we 
live by that which is not ourselves ? And why 
should it be deemed other than most reasona- 
ble to suppose that, as we live our physical life 
by a mysterious union with nature in which 



78 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

God lives and works, so we live our spiritual 
life by a still more close and mysterious union 
with God Himself? 

A. I will confess that I have heard some of 
your speculations with less aversion than I an- 
ticipated. But you seem to me too perversely 
bent on reducing all theology to the very low- 
est terms. You seem afraid to say what you 
appear to mean, and oft times afraid to mean 
what you appear to say. You speak of a living 
power, and you call it God. But, lest you 
should be taken at your word, you hasten to 
re-baptize it simply a power. Sometimes it 
suddenly appears as He ; but, to show that the 
change signifies nothing, He becomes it again 
immediately. Can you not decide firmly whether 
the facts of nature, without and within the 
mind, do or do not warrant a distinct avowal of 
belief in a living and personal God, separate 
from nature and from man, though manifested 
in them ? If you cannot, you really only de- 
clare, with a great deal of unnecessary empha- 
sis, that you believe in nature and in man. 

C. If I reduce theology to its lowest terms, I 
admit that they are lowest terms, and that far 
higher terms would still be much below the 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 79 

truth. I have avoided saying anything about 
a personal God, not because I would sacrifice 
that for which the doctrine of the personality 
of God is deemed so important, but because I 
feared to introduce this very difficult subject 
prematurely, and also somewhat doubted the 
wisdom of introducing the term, personality, at 
all. But if you will furnish a definition of the 
divine personality which will be clearly con- 
sistent with the good orthodox doctrines of 
the Infinity, and the Omnipresence of God, 
we shall neither hesitate nor halt in finding 
personality in the universal power in nature, 
without and within the mind of man. By a 
person, I think, we commonly mean a living 
being possessed of intelligence and freedom. 
It is hard to conceive of such a being as 
diffused all over the universe, and as present in 
the minds of all reasonable beings through all 
worlds. But it is just as hard, on the other 
hand, to believe that the source and ground of 
all nature, of all mind as well as of all matter, 
is other than intelligent or other than free. 
Man is instinctively led to reverence and 
worship the power which is both hidden and 
revealed in nature. Now, man is a person ; 



80 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

and a person can never truly worship a thing. 
In the free spontaneous worship of the power 
in nature we instinctively confess its person- 
ality. Or we may say, with many thoughtful 
men, in order to avoid all appearance of undue 
anthropomorphism, that we must confess in 
nature, not exactly personality, but something 
akin to personality, only far higher and greater. 
A. Deliver us from such scrupulous precision 
and such adulation of the divine ! It is the kiss 
of betrayal. It is kicking the power in nature 
upstairs out of the way. The personality of 
God may well be described as infinitely higher 
and greater than ours, and as entirely free 
from the limitations which hedge in our human 
personality. But it must still be personality, 
or something, to our minds, not higher, but 
lower. There is nothing akin to intelligence 
but intelligence ; there is nothing like freedom 
but freedom. More intelligence is intelligence 
still ; and greater freedom is still freedom. 
Omniscience is free from human limitations ; 
but omniscience is intelligence. Absolute uni- 
versal sovereignty is not unduly anthropo- 
morphic ; but it is freedom. God must needs 
be either intelligent or ignorant. He must 



Prayer-Meeting Theology. 81 

needs be free or not free. There is nothing 
devoid of personality that we can think or 
dream about which can possibly be higher 
than personality. And there is nothing like 
personality but personality itself. 

B. I also think that we should refrain from 
speaking of that which is greater and higher 
than personality until we can do so understand- 
ing what we say and whereof we affirm. Per- 
sonality, if not itself absolutely the highest, is 
at least an essential condition of all that is high- 
est within the limits both of what we actually 
know and of what we at present have any 
power to conceive. Personality, and intelli- 
gence, and freedom may be poor words for our 
purpose. They may convey an impression 
that we seek a God made altogether in our own 
image, and not One infinitely exalted above 
all and in whose image we ourselves are made. 
We shall be glad to provide all safeguards 
possible against such an impression. But, our 
own nature being what it is, we cannot confess 
that God is other than personal without feeling 
that we are placing Him below personal beings, 
and making Him a thing, — an immense thing, it 
is true, and most mysterious and indispensable, 

6 



82 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

but still a thing, which, as you rightly say, we 
can never love or adore. If man is to worship 
the power in nature, that power should be per- 
sonal. So much I see clearly. But you assume 
without proof that man must be right in wor- 
shipping ; that his worship is a rational or spir- 
itual act, and not the confused self-prostration 
of a creature overwhelmed and awe-struck. 
You find the justification of the worship in the 
worship itself, and not in any previous proof of 
the being of a God worthy of worship. You 
find your personal God, not directly in nature, 
but, by implication, in the attitude of the 
human mind towards the unseen. 

C. Yes, I find the personal God implied in 
the spontaneous attitude of man towards the 
unseen ; that is, I find Him implied in my own 
spontaneous attitude. In other words, the un- 
seen power in nature is such as necessarily leads 
me to recognize it as worthy of my devout 
adoration. This seems to me very direct. I 
must withhold worship or acknowledge person- 
ality. Withhold worship I cannot. Therefore 
acknowledge personality I clearly must. 

I suggested that we should speak of the 
power in nature not as personal but as higher 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 8$ 

and greater than any personal being, because I 
was anxious to go as far as possible to meet the 
views of candid men who find it more difficult 
than you do to entertain the thought of the 
personality of God. To many, personality seems 
an essentially human form of being ; and its 
attributes, intelligence and freedom, seem 
essentially finite attributes. Now, we certainly 
do not wish to prove that God's being is essen- 
tially human, or that His highest attributes are 
essentially finite. If, to avoid disputing about 
words, we concede to those who differ from us 
their view of personality as essentially finite, 
we must then be as emphatic as they are in 
repudiating the thought of the personality of 
God. And if they believe, as they undoubtedly 
do, in a being infinitely higher and greater and 
more adorable than any personal being can be, 
that is precisely what we believe in too when 
we have conceded to them their view of the 
limitations of personality. But you do not 
share in their view of such limitations. You 
do not regard intelligence as necessarily limited 
to " certain circumscribed modes of psychical 
activity in man and some other animals " any 
more than you regard space as certain circum- 



84 Pray er- Meeting Theology. 

scribed measures of extension in houses and 
some other buildings. Omniscience is to you 
no more of an absurdity than infinite space or 
duration without beginning and without end. 
Even an " Infinite Person " is to you an infinite 
mystery, like every other infinite, but not a 
contradiction in terms, not a " circular tri- 
angle." Conceding to you your view, as I 
conceded to the others theirs, I am free to say 
with you that I believe in a personal God, as I 
said with them that I believe in a God higher 
and greater than personal. What I mean in 
each case is that I believe in a God who is un- 
questionably worthy of our highest adoration. 
The difficulty with you is to make out the 
compatibility of personality with infinity. The 
difficulty with the others is to give adequate 
security that the being, who is declared to be 
too great and too adorable to be personal or 
intelligent or free, really is so great and so 
adorable, without giving any inkling of his 
great qualities or any assurance that he has or 
can have any qualities at all, and without stat- 
ing how he is to be adored or what he is to be 
adored for. Your difficulty, though assuredly 
great enough, is perhaps the less desperate 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 85 

of the two, especially as the others will help 
you much more than you can help them. Those 
who reject the idea of God's personality declare 
at the same time that ^ degree of anthropo- 
morphism is necessary in thinking and speak- 
ing of the universal power in nature. There 
they open a door for you which no man can 
shut. If you can prove that the degree of 
anthropomorphism involved in your faith is 
necessary for the full development and free 
activity of man's nature, you have as much 
right to that degree as they have to any degree 
at all. Compatibility with the infinity, or with 
a proper faith in the infinity, of God is not 
endangered in the one case any more than in 
the other. Those who deny the personality of 
God admit further that there is a scale, or an 
ascending order, in the manifestations of the 
eternal power in nature. Mr. Fiske says that 
" our new knowedge enlarges ten-fold the 
significance of human life, and makes it seem 
more than ever the chief object of Divine care, 
the consummate fruition of that creative energy 
which is manifested throughout the knowable 
universe " {Destiny of Man, p. 107). In human 
life itself also there is an ascending order. Mr. 



86 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

Fiske says : " Henceforth the life of the nascent 
soul came to be first in importance, and the 
bodily life became subordinated to it " {lb., 
p. 30). The candor of this admirable writer is 
so great that I should be extremely sorry to 
press a single word of his beyond its intended 
meaning. But in his great work, Outlines of 
Cosmic Philosophy, he seems to me to intimate 
that this higher element in man, though of 
course it does not make known the unknowable, 
at least points more truly than anything else 
known unto us to the proper and essential 
nature of God. I quote his words: "If now 
we proceed to the outermost verge of admis- 
sible speculation, and inquire for a moment 
what may perhaps be the nature of that In- 
scrutable Existence of which the universe of 
phenomena is the multiform manifestation, we 
shall find that its intimate essence may con- 
ceivably be identifiable with the intimate essence 
of what we know as Mind " (C. P., ii., 446). 
After making an extended quotation from Mr. 
Spencer's Principles of Psychology, he says : 
" From this masterly statement it appears that 
while the Inscrutable Power manifested in the 
world of phenomena cannot possibly be re- 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 87 

garded as quasi-material in its nature, it may 
nevertheless be possibly regarded as quasi- 
psychical. . . . Whichever set of terms we 
use, we are using symbols, the values of which 
are determined by our experiences of con- 
ditioned existence, and which must therefore 
be totally inadequate to express the charac- 
teristics of unconditioned existence. Neverthe- 
less, in so far as the exigencies of finite thinking 
require us to symbolize the Infinite Power 
manifested in the world of phenomena, we are 
clearly bound to symbolize it as quasi-psychical 
rather than as quasi-material" (C. P., ii., 448, 
449). Here is another short passage from the 
same writer : " The greatest philosopher of 
modern times, the master and teacher of all 
who shall study the process of evolution for 
many a day to come, holds that the conscious 
soul is not the product of a collocation of mate- 
rial particles, but is in the deepest sense a 
divine effluence" {Destiny of Man, p. 117). In 
what immediately follows, Mr. Fiske himself 
calls the soul, "this divine spark." As I said 
before, I have no wish to press all this further 
than it will go. But to my thinking, the 
primacy here given to the mind of man among 



88 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

the phenomena of nature, and the emphatic 
concession of its exceptionally close relation to 
the Divine nature, point most significantly to 
the great mystery of the personality of God. 

And here let me just mention the good old 
argument from the indications of design in 
nature. It would serve little purpose to enu- 
merate instances of the exquisite adaptation of 
means to ends and of far-seeing, far-reaching 
combinations of adjustments in nature. These 
are patent to all ; and as great and marvellous 
facts they are universally acknowledged. Those 
who reject them as proofs of creative design, 
reject them, as Paley says, on the ground, 
" not only that the present order of nature 
is insufficient to prove the existence of an 
intelligent Creator, but that no imaginable 
order would be sufficient to prove it ; that no 
contrivance, were it ever so mechanical, ever 
so precise, ever so clear, ever so perfectly like 
those which we ourselves employ, would sup- 
port this conclusion." We, who cannot pre- 
tend to take that lofty ground, can by no means 
evade the force of the argument from the 
actual facts of nature. To us these facts bear 
obvious marks of forethought or design, marks 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 89 

which no manipulation can efface. To-day it 
is quite customary to assert that the doctrine 
of evolution has destroyed the old proof of 
design in nature. But there could not be a 
greater mistake. If evolution is a true account 
of nature, then evolution must bear in its own 
body all the marks of design which we find 
in nature. Indications of design are just as 
perceptible and just as significant in a process 
as in a result. Trace nature back through 
evolution, through all manner of supposed 
laws and necessities, through whatever pro- 
cesses, through whatever machinery you please ; 
you must find her origin at last either in design 
or in no design, either in a divine mind that 
saw the end from the beginning or in a blind 
chance that saw nothing at all. As to the 
bearing of evolution on the argument, I only 
need once more to quote a few words from 
one of the foremost evolutionists of our time: 
" . . . the doctrine of evolution shows us 
distinctly for the first time how the creation 
and the perfecting of Man is the goal toward 
which Nature's work has been tending from 
the first " (Fiske, Destiny of Man, p. 107). 
" But on the face of our own planet, where 



go Pray er- Meeting Theology. 

alone we are able to survey the process of 
evolution in its higher and more complex 
details, we do find distinct indications of a 
dramatic tendency, though doubtless not of 
purpose in the limited human sense. The 
Darwinian theory, properly understood, re- 
places as much teleology as it destroys. From 
the first dawning of life we see all things 
working together toward one mighty goal, the 
evolution of the most exalted spiritual quali- 
ties which characterize humanity" {lb., p. 113). 
Nobody is concerned to discover traces in 
nature of " purpose in the limited human 
sense." But there does seem to be a true 
necessity of regarding the power in nature as 
a being who has what must be called thoughts 
and ways of his own, though they are higher 
than our ways and our thoughts as the heavens 
are higher than the earth. If we cannot re- 
concile this necessity with his infinity, then, 
to meet the necessity, we must set aside our 
ordinary notions of infinity, just as, according 
to Prof. Jevons and Mr. Fiske, we must set 
aside our ordinary notions of matter to meet 
the apparent necessity of believing in the lumi- 
niferous ether, which is forced upon our minds 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 91 

by irresistible evidence, though its compati- 
bility with the known properties of matter 
can no more be made out than the compati- 
bility of God's personality with His infinity. 

B. So here is the philosopher's stone at last. 
Here is the golden key to every difficulty, the 
reconciliation of all obstinate contradictions. 
Now everything will be compatible with every- 
thing else without any trouble. And how 
simple it is after all ! Only " set aside your 
ordinary notions" ; set aside common sense ; 
set aside first principles; set aside whatever 
is in the way ; and there you are ! Setting 
aside our ordinary notions of infinity, we shall 
have a finite infinity, which we ought to be 
able to manage very nicely. But do you really 
think that this is the way to settle the great 
question of the personality of the God of 
nature? 

C. We can scarcely afford the time to re-open 
the whole question now. If we seem to you to 
have failed to discover a personal God directly 
in outward nature, turn once more to the 
manifestation of God within the mind. There 
at least you have the personality first and fore- 
most of all. The power present within us is 



92 Prayer -Meeting Theology, 

known directly as of a higher wisdom, and of 
a purer purpose than our own ; that is, as sur- 
passing us in the very elements of personality, 
and as being the strength and support of our 
own personal life. The power within us, which 
leads us and instructs us, which gives us great 
spiritual commandments and insists on our free 
and full obedience, which judges us in righteous- 
ness and yet absolves us in mercy day by 
day, the awakener, the director, the comforter, 
the judge, of our own personal life, can be no 
other than personal in the deepest, largest sense 
possible. 

B. Then you find a personal God dimly 
revealed in external nature. And you find a 
personal God in the mind revealed more clearly 
and fully. But if what is revealed in outward 
nature is so unlike what is revealed in the mind, 
how can you be sure that you have not 
stumbled upon two gods in your search for 
one ? By what means do you identify the ob- 
scurely personal God in outward nature with 
the unmistakably personal God in the mind ? 

C. External nature cannot break away 
utterly from the mind of man. They are 
under the same supreme law. No bounds 



Prayer- Meeting TJieology. 93 

without can be set to Him who reigns within. 
The Lord of the soul will dominate the uni- 
verse. Knowing and worshipping Him within, 
you can have no other gods before Him. There- 
fore, if outward nature perplexes you too much, 
leave her alone awhile. She will speak to you 
the more plainly the less you urge her. And 
you will understand her perfectly when you 
know yourself better. 

" Mind not the stars, mind thou thy mind and God." 

A. You are not far from the faith and phil- 
osophy of the thrifty idolater of whom Isaiah 
speaks. " He planteth an ash, and the rain 
doth nourish it. Then shall it be for a man to 
burn ; he burneth part thereof in the fire ; with 
part thereof he eateth flesh ; he roasteth a roast, 
and is satisfied ; yea, he warmeth himself, and 
saith, Aha, I am warm ; I have seen the fire : 
and the residue thereof he maketh a God, even 
his graven image : he falleth down unto it, and 
worshippeth it, and prayeth unto it and saith, 
Deliver me : for thou art my God ! " You 
take a man instead of a tree. And there is no 
burning or baking. But with part of your man 
you make a plain citizen, a voter, a tax-payer, 



94 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

a consumer of the fruit of the earth ; with part 
you will have to make a sinner or perhaps a 
saint ; there are various uses for other parts : 
and the residue of the same man you make a 
God. Following your lead, we might well find 
in every man not only God but Legion. For 
we are all full of conflicting thoughts and strong 
impulses which draw us and drive us their 
various ways. Why should that which you 
call God in man be thought other than a part 
of the man himself, though much the better 
part, and though surely receiving strength from 
God most High ? One part of the ash-tree was 
doubtless better fitted for a graven image than 
some other parts. But the image was still a 
piece of wood and not God. Some parts of 
man are more godlike than other parts. But 
is any part at all for that reason very God ? I, 
for one, find no part of my own mind divine. 
When I pray, I do not turn with one part of 
my mind to another part of the same. I must 
turn not unto myself but away from myself. I 
must look up, and say, Our Father, who art in 
heaven. 

C. Our Father is in heaven, it is true ; and 
it is right and helpful for us to look up and 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 95 

lift up our hearts unto Him, and think of Him 
as the Most High. But the heaven of heavens 
cannot contain him. He is exalted far above 
all the heavens. And at the same time He 
condescends to the least and the lowest of His 
creatures. He is at hand to hear the call of 
the young ravens when they cry to Him for 
food, and to receive the expiring breath of the 
sparrow that falls to the ground. And He is 
not far from any one of us. He compasseth 
our path and our lying down, and He is 
acquainted with all our ways. He dwells 
within us. He is the light of our minds and 
the strength of our hearts. In His light do we 
see light. He does not lift up His voice ; He 
does not disturb or displace our thoughts to 
make room for himself. He dwells gently in 
the midst of them, the infinite in the midst of 
the finite, breathing upon them and making 
them His ministers. That is the reason why it 
seems to you so difficult to distinguish any 
divine presence in the multitude of your own 
thoughts. 

B. And what if it be not only difficult but 
impossible ? What if there be nothing manifest 
and nothing present in man but man himself, a 



96 Pray er- Meeting Theology. 

divided man, a higher and a lower in perpetual 
conflict, but still man and nothing more ? The 
higher element in man is often crowded and 
crushed by the lower. Could the indwelling 
God be imprisoned and imperilled, be starved, 
and have his eyes put out, and be made to 
grind in the mill of depraved lusts ? The rela- 
tive position of what we call higher and lower 
is often reversed in the thoughts of men. 
Many walk now, as of old, whose God is their 
belly, and whose glory is in their shame. 

C. There is truth in what you say ; but it is 
not the whole truth. The most depraved men, 
those who have done their utmost to turn their 
moral nature upside down, are still aware of 
something within them which they have not 
dragged into the mire. They would overturn 
it if they could. They mock at it and spite- 
fully entreat it. They are infuriated at its 
inviolate majesty : 

" Highly they rage 
Against the highest, and fierce with grasped arms, 
Clash on their sounding shields the din of war." 

This raging zeal of the ungodly betrays their 
consciousness that God is with them still, and 



Prayer -Meeting Theology, 97 

that He has by no means taken the millstones 
to grind for them. Whether in mockery and 
rage and defiance or in humility and faith, all 
men acknowledge a Higher than themselves in 
the midst of all their thoughts. The experi- 
ence of one or of a few may leave that Higher 
in great obscurity. But He becomes more 
clearly known as we consult the common ex- 
perience of mankind. And this, as well as the 
proposed order of our conversation and the 
speeding away of the hours at our disposal, 
bids us now consider what help to believe in 
God we may derive from the history of the 
world. 

B. It has often seemed to me that it is pre- 
cisely the history of the world which weakens 
and threatens our faith most of all. In spite 
of difficulties, my personal experience, taken 
alone, would perhaps eventually sustain much 
of what you have said about our perceiving a 
divine power in nature. But the pages of his- 
tory, so blurred with evil and with sorrow from 
the beginning until now, stagger me. How 
could such a God as we should at all care 
to believe in allow generation after genera- 
tion of His children to live and die in this 



98 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

misery ? What though a divine goodness seem 
to look forth graciously upon me both from 
without and from within? I must ask, Why 
wilt thou manifest thyself unto me and not 
unto the world? And the feeling is strong 
upon me that a divinity which fails to reach 
and bless the world at large must be a baseless 
vision in the clouds, displaying riches and glo- 
ries impalpable and unabiding. I am not 
better than my brethren, and in spite of fair 
visions and dreams I must share the fate of my 
kind, a fate of which the sorrowful history of 
the world bodes little good. 

C. And yet I doubt not but your faith has 
received much of its strongest support from 
the history of the world. The good which we 
receive is easily forgotten if we also receive or 
seem to receive evil. There are pages of his- 
tory which must seem disheartening if perused 
alone. And desultory, capricious, frivolous 
reading may well make universal history a com- 
pact Book of Lamentations. Too much of the 
history which we read is made up on the plan 
of the sensational newspapers, which carefully 
skip everything that is not more or less calcu- 
lated to harrow up our souls. All hurricanes 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 99 

and earthquakes, all devastations on land and 
sea, all plagues and famines, all the atrocities 
of massacre and battle, all the crime and filth 
of the round world, and all the infirmities and 
pains of man and beast and bird and creeping 
thing, are heaped together and presented to us 
as the concentrated essence of history. Of 
this monstrous history we are required to fur- 
nish a complete justification at a moment's 
notice and at the peril of our faith. And be- 
fore we can make any reply, a loud Babel of 
blasphemous, unbelieving, hopeless solutions 
is thrust upon us with the problem itself. We 
must carry the aggregate burden of all the 
world upon our backs, and have the vicious 
world itself jump upon us and assault us at the 
same time. This is the kind of history which 
is such a trial to your faith. It is a picked and 
packed history, picked and packed with demo- 
niacal ingenuity in the interest of despair. 
You have known sin and sorrow in your own 
life, and you know that you cannot escape the 
last act of the solemn tragedy. After a life of 
tribulation you must be stretched on the rack 
and have your soul and body torn asunder. 
But you can tranquilly believe in God though 



ioo Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

He slay you. For you the extremity of suffer- 
ing is also the limit of suffering. Mortal pains 
can kill your body, but after that they can do 
nothing more. And even in their hour and 
power they cannot separate you from the love 
of God. They are but His ministers conduct- 
ing you to His more glorious presence. In 
like manner you can witness the sufferings and 
the dissolution of those whom you love best, 
not only without loss, but with a positive in- 
crease, of faith. As you watch by their bedside, 
powerless to help, though willing to give your 
life for them, the world may grow dim and 
unreal to you, but heaven is nearer and God 
is more your hope and your portion than ever 
before. By His grace you can bear your own 
particular burden and help to bear the burdens 
of your kindred and friends. But you are 
confounded and crushed by the burden of the 
wide world. It is the vastness of the aggre- 
gate, not the actual pressure upon any particu- 
lar soul, that overwhelms you. But it is a per- 
verse study of history that has left you to 
shoulder this stupendous mass all alone. Such 
a mass in truth exists nowhere. The good and 
the evil in the world are distributed. Every 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 101 

heart knoweth its own sorrow, and a stranger 
intermeddleth not with its joy. You may have 
been favored in the distribution. But men 
who were not favored have been enabled to 
bear their burdens as cheerfully as you can 
bear yours. Men have lived in the worst and 
darkest times, and have borne all the evil that 
misfortune can bring, and all that injustice and 
cruelty can devise, and yet have believed in 
God the Father Almighty to the end, their 
faith growing stronger the more it was tried. 
It is not to you alone that God is a very present 
help in trouble. He waits on every sufferer in 
all the world. If you can believe in Him in 
view of the evil in your own life and lot, there 
is nothing in history to disturb your faith, but 
very much to confirm it. 

B. My reading of history has been desultory 
enough no doubt. But if the history itself is 
" picked and packed," I cannot help that. It 
is the only history within my reach. There is 
no use in talking about history as it should be, 
or as we should like to find it. Our only con- 
cern is with history as it is. And this unques- 
tionably is stained with cruelty and wrong and 
helpless misery on every page. What you say 



102 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

of the distribution of evil, and of the concur- 
rent distribution of unseen help and consola- 
tion, of the limit of suffering, and of the 
prospect of a solution of the mystery of sorrow 
hereafter, has some significance as regards the 
human race ; though, in consoling ourselves 
thus, we seem to be taking God for granted, to 
compensate the evil of history, rather than 
rinding God in the actual process of history 
itself. But a long chapter in the history 
of the world must be given to our dumb 
fellow-creatures, whose life is possibly more 
instructive, because less ambiguous, than our 
own. And I wonder if the history of the 
animal kingdom below mankind has been 
" picked and packed " too ! What shall be 
said of countless races of living creatures com- 
ing into the world thirsting for blood and 
armed for slaughter ? Is not relentless cruelty 
the fundamental law of their being? And 
what shall be said of their innumerable victims ? 
Have you any consolation for them here or 
hereafter ? The history of the world, rational 
and irrational, in all its generations, is the his- 
tory of carnage, the history of the violence of 
the strong and the torture and destruction of 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 103 

the weak. This terrible history is capable of 
some sort of vindication as it concerns man- 
kind. But what vindication is conceivable in 
the case of the myriad generations of whole 
races brought into being for violence, or for 
agony, and for nothing further ? Is not the 
question of the being of God concerned with 
the unmitigated uncompensated butchery in 
the animal world, as well as with the more 
hopeful trials of humanity ? And if the being 
of God is utterly disproved by the savage story 
of the brute creation, does not the more toler- 
able story of mankind come too late to retrieve 
the disaster? 

C. It is well to hear the other side, if there 
be another side, after the most plausible argu- 
ment in the world. Our ill-balanced minds 
are too easily carried away by a first attack, 
whoever delivers it. Very flimsy rhetoric suf- 
fices to make the worse appear the better 
reason to the uninstructed. Arguments seem 
to be unanswerable, which, when we know a 
little more, astonish or amuse us by their 
blundering simplicity. It would be a very 
serious mistake to ponder the history of the 
brute and refuse to contemplate your own. 



104 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

There are revelations in the actual history of 
mankind which no interpretation of the life of 
the lower races can gainsay. The lower must 
be interpreted by the higher, not the higher by 
the lower. If the story of mankind proves the 
being of God, the story of the brute creation 
is not incapable of being reconciled with the 
devoutest faith in Him. It is our ignorance 
rather than our knowledge of brute life which 
furnishes weapons for unbelief; and it is blind 
presumption rather than reasoning which 
wields them. Our commiseration of the brute 
is entirely gratuitous. He hath meat to eat 
that we know not of. He has resources to 
which we are strangers. There is a rounded 
completeness in his life, and in its adaptation 
to the world he lives in, which should waken 
our admiration rather than our pity. The life 
of a bat is worth living. The life of the smallest 
insect, though it last but a single day, is a won- 
drous gift to a particle of dust. We should not 
complain of the Giver that He gives no more, but 
praise Him that He gives so much. The life of 
the higher animals which range through field 
and forest, and of the birds which navigate the 
air at their pleasure, has a freedom and a fresh- 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 105 

ness, and a largeness and closeness of relation 
to nature, which almost excite our envy. The 
pains of animal life, being wholly natural, need 
no spiritual consolation ; and they are prob- 
ably provided with more natural relief than we 
are aware of. As to the struggle for existence 
between the various races, who knows but it 
may be the spice, rather than the bitterness, of 
their life ? With all our humanity and all our 
civilization, we cannot dispense with hunting 
and fishing for sport as well as for prey ; and 
if there be extreme peril of life and limb, the 
sport is all the better. We court rather than 
shun danger; and if we cannot find enough of 
it hunting the buffalo on the prairie and the 
tiger in the jungle, we seek the full gaudia 
certaminis'm mortal conflict with our fellow-men 
on blood-red battle-fields. And if deadly 
struggle excites savage joy in our human and 
domesticated breasts, what a triumph must 
battle itself be to the brute nature free from 
scruple and care and foreboding ! It may well 
be that the argument against the being of God 
from the struggle for existence in the brute 
creation, if all the facts were understood, would 
appear as unreasonable as a similar argument 



106 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

based on the struggle of the southwest wind 
with the Icarian waves. 

If this view of the brute seems to add insult 
to injury, there is another view open which gives 
him, or rather gives his friends on his behalf, a 
hope approximating that which is the great 
consolation of mankind. You have assumed 
that the brutes perish forever; that they are 
brought forth for slaughter and for nothing 
further. But that is certainly more than we 
know. The most cautious of English divines, 
Bishop Butler, saw no insuperable difficulty in 
the supposition that brutes should be immortal 
and capable of everlasting happiness. He saw 
no difficulty in supposing that they may 
" arrive at great attainments, and become 
rational and moral agents ; . . . since we 
know not what latent powers and capacities 
they may be endued with. There was once, 
prior to experience, as great presumption 
against human creatures as there is against the 
brute creatures, arriving at that degree of 
understanding which we have in mature age. 
For we can trace up our own existence to the 
same original with theirs. And we find it to 
be a general law of nature, that creatures 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 107 

endued with capacities of virtue and religion 
should be placed in a condition of being, in 
which they are altogether without the use of 
them, for a considerable length of their dura- 
tion ; as in infancy and childhood. And great 
part of the human species go out of the present 
world, before they come to the exercise of 
these capacities in any degree at all " (Analogy, 
part i., chap. i.). The thought of the possible 
exaltation of the brutes from their low estate 
to immortal life is not only held to be theoreti- 
cally legitimate by great orthodox theologians, 
but is also practically cherished as a more or 
less reasonable hope by men and women of 
Christian faith who have found affectionate 
and interesting companionship in the animal 
world. The late Miss Charlotte Williams 
Wynn, a lady of high social distinction and 
of unusual attainments in theology, the friend 
of Maurice and Bunsen, seriously regarded 
her dog, " Poor little Moey," not only as 
more loving than a great-uncle and more 
edifying than many a clergyman, but as a 
desirable and hopeful candidate for life in 
the world to come. " My belief is fixed — " 
she writes; "All that loving faculty, that 



108 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

devotedness, will, in some way, continue in 
existence." 

This thought of the future advancement of 
the brute, not unreasonable in itself, and not 
repulsive to many people of the noblest nature 
and of the highest culture, finds support in the 
conjectures of scientific men as to the original 
relations of man to the other animals. And 
it finds still stronger support in some of the 
most interesting speculations of theologians 
in regard to the remote future. Dr. Edward 
Beecher, after noticing pregnant hints of 
Scripture and current thoughts of Christian 
men in regard to the Church of God and 
especially in regard to its position and work in 
the eternity to come, gives great prominence 
to " one simple idea." u It is this : that the work 
of creating and training intelligent beings to 
know and love and serve God is but just 
begun, and that the main increase and exten- 
sion of the universe is yet to come ; and that 
by the redemption of the church the universe 
of God will be brought to such a state that that 
increase can be made without any hazard of 
any new entrance of moral evil, and be con- 
tinued for ever, — and especially that the 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 109 

church, owing to the manner of her redemp- 
tion, and her peculiar training, will be prepared 
to preside over and to train the successive 
generations of new created minds as no others 
can ; and that, for this end, and also as the 
resting-place of his own highest and most 
peculiar affections, she will be united to God, 
and exalted to reign with Him in the manner 
that has been described. Also, that the rela- 
tion of this union between the church and 
God to this increase, is the reason why it is 
called a marriage. Viewed in this light, the 
redemption of the church, as set forth in the 
preceding statements, derived from the Word 
of God, loses its aspect of an insulated, exag- 
gerated, and incredible transaction. It is at 
once placed in the centre of the system, as a 
simple and rational means for the attainment 
of ends so definite, so vast, so momentous, so 
deeply affecting, that they at once fill and 
satisfy the mind as worthy of God. . . . 
We see the importance to God, and to the 
whole universe, of the redemption of the 
church. It fully justifies the use of such 
means as the incarnation and the atonement. 
It shows why God created and governs all 



no Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

things with reference to this end. It shows why 
the advent of the day of the final union of God 
and the church is an occurrence of such deep 
interest to Him and to His holy kingdom. It 
shows why it is such a crisis in the history of 
the universe, — why to it all things have tended 
from the beginning, and why from it all things 
will for ever diverge, after the great work shall 
be finally completed " {Conflict of Ages, pp. 
500, 501). 

If the creation of intelligent beings is but just 
begun, if it will be but just beginning in earnest 
when the present drama of human history has 
reached its conclusion and the increase of the 
human race is at an end, where are the number- 
less hosts of new-created minds to come from ? 
The great Creator no doubt could at once call 
them forth from nothingness by the word of 
His power. But it is more natural to suppose 
that He will utilize existing material and carry 
to higher perfection work already begun, gath- 
ering up all the fragments that nothing be lost, 
than that He will suffer His old creation and 
the travail of immeasurable time to go to waste, 
and begin again at void nothingness. In fact, 
if this great new creation is to take place, we 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 1 1 1 

have every reason to believe that it will consist 
in promoting the tribes of the older creation 
from the bondage of nature to the freedom of 
reason and spirit. Holy Scripture was given 
for the comfort and edification of man, but it 
glances significantly at the dumb animals in 
some of its deepest passages. It explicitly 
represents them as interested in the mystery of 
our salvation, and as waiting with us for the 
great day of the Lord. " For the earnest ex- 
pectation of the creature waiteth for the mani- 
festation of the sons of God. For the creature 
was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but 
by reason of him who hath subjected the same 
in hope. Because the creature itself also shall 
be delivered from the bondage of corruption 
into the glorious liberty of the children of God. 
For we know that the whole creation groaneth 
and travaileth in pain together until now " 
(Rom. viii., 19-22). The whole animal king- 
dom is represented before the heavenly throne 
in the Revelation of St. John. " In the midst 
of the throne, and round about the throne, 
were four beasts full of eyes before and behind. 
And the first beast was like a lion, and the 
second beast like a calf, and the third beast had 



H2 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like 
a flying eagle " (Rev. iv., 6, 7). These forms 
are interpreted, by some of the most highly 
esteemed commentators as well as by the plain- 
est readers, as " representatives of animated 
nature — of God's sentient creation." And 
there, in heaven, representing the whole sen- 
tient creation, they not only unite in the anthem 
of praise to the Creator for the power and 
glory manifested in all His works, but also fall 
down, with the four and twenty elders, before 
the Lamb, and glorify Him for His great re- 
demption. And even as the heavenly hosts 
respond with a loud voice, saying, Worthy is 
the Lamb that was slain, so also the lowly con- 
stituencies of the four living creatures confirm 
their representative adoration and repeat their 
hymn of praise. " And every creature which 
is in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth, 
and such as are in the sea, and all that are in 
them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honor, and 
glory, and power be unto Him that sitteth 
upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever 
and ever" (Rev. v., 13). The representatives 
of all animated nature not only worship the 
Redeemer, with the saints and the angels, but 



Prayer -Meeting Theology. 1 1 3 

they are as eager for the full triumph of His 
glorious cause as the souls of the martyrs under 
the altar. They look and long for His victori- 
ous appearance. And even as the Spirit and 
the Bride say, Come ; and as the blessed soul 
who beheld the vision says, Come, Lord Jesus ; 
even so, when the seals are opened and signs 
and wonders announce the approach of the 
great consummation, the four living creatures, 
with equal ardor, in behalf of all sentient na- 
ture, say, Come ! 

This seems to imply that, when the book of 
God's eternal purpose is at last unfolded, ani- 
mated nature, instead of perishing, is to be 
translated to a higher life and to be included in 
the great gathering together in one of all 
things which are in heaven and which are in 
earth. What a compensation this would be 
for any grievances of the brute races ! To 
arrive at the spiritual state just as that state is 
placed for ever beyond the hazard of another 
fall, by the complete redemption of the Church 
and the glorious manifestation therein of the 
righteousness and holy love of God, which to 
know aright is eternal life to all spiritual 
beings ! So that the delay of their deliver- 



ii4 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

ance is their safety; and man's dominion over 
them is well earned by his dire conflict with 
moral evil, waged no less on their behalf than 
on his own ; and the thousands of their num- 
bers which, in all ages, have been sacrificed on 
altars erected by man did not suffer for man 
alone, but for man representing their own mul- 
titudes in spiritual conflict, even as they repre- 
sented him upon the bleeding altars ! 

Not to dogmatize on so mysterious a subject, 
I will only say that this view is quite as legiti- 
mate as the assumption that all the brutes 
perish ; and that, in any case, our ignorance is 
a sufficient answer to all atheistic inferences 
from the condition of the brutes. 

B. To save time, I will allow that your 
apology for the history of the world is sufficient. 
But in making the apology, you have had to 
take God and immortality — that is, you have 
had to take everything — for granted. It is 
great boldness, it is almost reckless violence, 
to assume without proof the solemnly debated, 
ardently desired future life of man. But this 
costly pearl, which is scarcely within reach of 
the human race, you must cast before all the 
swinish, wolfish herds of creation, if they or 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 115 

their friends fail to appreciate your rose-colored 
view of their miserable and bloody existence. 
It remains to be seen how a history which has 
to enlist the most miraculously extravagant 
faith in its own defence can do anything to 
strengthen our simple faith in the being of 
God. 

C. History will need no defence if you give 
it a fair and full hearing. I assume God and 
immortality, not as undoubted realities to undo 
the evil of a justly condemned history, but as 
open questions, the very questions in debate, to 
bespeak for the great, complicate, much-abused, 
little-understood, still-unfinished history of the 
world a patient and candid examination. 

Of history as a witness for the being of God 
I may perhaps say, as one of us said of nature, 
that it gives much of its testimony in subtle 
ways which answer the purpose but defy 
analysis. But it also furnishes much weighty 
evidence which we can easily handle and esti- 
mate. In the first place, it multiplies examples, 
in every form and under all varieties of circum- 
stances, of the great direct proof with which 
we are familiar in our individual experience, 
the perception of the Divine both in external 



n6 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

nature and within the soul. When we touched 
this point before, you wondered how I knew so 
much about universal man, and whether I re- 
membered " the cannibals and all the low 
savages of the world," when I expressed my 
belief that man is everywhere a worshipper. 
Your opportunities and mine have been as 
nearly as possible the same. We have both 
alike observed " universal man " through the 
printed page at our own fireside. But I am as 
well satisfied as if I had explored Tierra del 
Fuego for myself, and boarded around among 
the Eskimos and the Hottentots. I know that 
there are savages who are very poor worship- 
pers, — so poor that great men, from Herodotus 
to Hegel and our own time, have refused them 
the name of worshippers and have called them 
sorcerers and magicians and other names meaner 
still. Instead of humbly confessing their de- 
pendence upon the power which gives rain 
from heaven and fruitful seasons and other 
blessings which even savages need, they absurd- 
ly claim all authority for themselves and give 
peremptory orders to the deity. They locate 
him in a stone, or in a stick, or in anything 
handy that comes in their way, that they may 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 1 1 7 

have him completely in their power, to be 
whipped and kicked when he is unpropitious. 
But there he is after all, even when he with- 
holds rain or victory, and even when he is 
vicariously whipped in the poor fetich ! He is 
still acknowledged as a power that might have 
done good and actually has done evil ! The 
sorcery, the magic, even the impotent rage 
and the whipping, must be regarded as modes 
of worship, though of the lowest description. 
Humility or reverence or wisdom there is none : 
but the direct pressure of the unseen, of the 
infinite, of God, upon the dark, obtuse, anarchic 
soul is involuntarily confessed. There are other 
savages, so-called, whose perception of the 
divine in nature is singularly clear, and whose 
worship is not unimpressive. But, after all, 
we have little to do with savages in history. 
Whether the savage state be considered as the 
primitive condition or as the corruption and 
decline of human society, it is not man's normal 
state. And we must study humanity, like 
other organisms, not in the germ or in decay 
and corruption, but in the maturest and most 
perfect forms to be found. We do not go to 
savages to learn what the human intellect is 



1 1 8 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

like, or what man as " a political animal " 
amounts to. Nor should we go to them to 
form our estimate of man as a spiritual being. 
We must study man in the great cultivated 
historical nations. And in them we shall find 
his faith in the Divine Unseen as real and as 
conspicuous as any other element of his higher 
nature. Like other characteristics, it varies in 
strength and in modes of manifestation among 
different nations. But differences in modes of 
manifestation under varying conditions only 
emphasize the reality and the identity of the 
faith itself everywhere. This is the first point 
in the testimony of history, that belief in the 
being of God is universal in normally developed 
human nature. 

In the second place, history shows that this 
religious belief, which in some form or other is 
universal among men, is also everywhere fruit- 
ful, not a dreamy shadowy thought or sentiment 
out of all relation to real life, but a powerful 
factor in every department of man's spiritual 
activity. Sometimes it works evil, monstrous 
evil on an enormous scale. Tantum religio 
potuit suadere malorum is an appropriate motto 
for many a long chapter in the history of 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 119 

religion. But to apply it to the history of 
religion as a whole would be exactly like offer- 
ing doleful stories of floods and conflagrations 
as a full account of the action and use of the 
great elements of fire and water upon the 
earth. " Religion," says Dr. Hedge, " builds 
by turns, and fires the world, — in its pureness 
the ornament and strength of society, in its 
perversion the scandal and scourge of nations." 
Its perversions and the evils which they occasion 
are accidental and temporary. Its contributions 
to the " ornament and strength of society "are 
its proper fruit ; and they endure, and bid fair 
to cover all the earth. We distinguish nowa- 
days between the religious and the secular ; 
and the secular, so distinguished, seems fair 
and strong. But history teaches distinctly that 
religion built up and preserved what is fairest 
and strongest in our so-called secular life. 
Science was cradled in a temple. Art was 
nurtured by religion from its birth to its fullest 
maturity. The moral discipline of the heart, 
and the inner principles of social morality, have 
always found their best support in religious 
feeling and faith. The great secular institu- 
tions of humanity, the family, and the school, 



120 Prayer-Meeting Theology. 

and the nation, have never been secular in the 
narrow sense of the word. The history of 
their development is a part of the history of 
religion ; and their strength on the earth to-day 
is demonstrably the strength of faith. 

But history proves the reality of the Object 
of faith, not only by showing the universality 
and the constructive power of the faith itself, 
but also, more directly, by showing the converg- 
ing lines which connect all human movements 
and constrain them to fulfil a Divine plan and 
purpose. The life of the human race is not a 
mere aggregate and succession of individual 
lives. There is an order in the whole which 
is not derived from the parts. There is the 
foreordained subordination of individuals and 
nations to a world-wide ever-maturing spiritual 
purpose. This purpose is not the purpose of 
men. Men resist it and often ignore it while 
helping it forward. And, at best, when they 
voluntarily consecrate themselves to its advance- 
ment, they are only partakers of it ; they are 
but its ministers. The purpose is still far in 
advance of them. It is not the purpose of men, 
though it takes hold of men and inspires them. 
It is the purpose of One who is within us all 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 121 

and above us all. It is the purpose of God ; 
and its gradual realization is the growing man- 
ifestation of God in history. 

B. I think it requires a special faculty not 
given unto all of us to detect the " converging 
lines " of a spiritual purpose in all human 
movements. What is called the progress of 
the race is, properly speaking, the progress 
of but a portion, less than one half, of the 
race. And that progress, such as it is, is 
easily explained, without Divine intervention, 
by the doctrine of evolution. I am con- 
strained to say that the doctrine of evolu- 
tion offers a better explanation, an explanation 
more in accordance with the obvious facts, than 
the nobler doctrine of a divine purpose. The 
tedious, devious, laboring, halting journey of 
poor Humanity from Chaos to the present 
Anarchy is just what you might expect from 
evolution, and not at all what one would have 
looked for from an intelligent and loving pur- 
pose armed with Omnipotent power. 

C. I never feel equal to the task of discussing 
evolution when it is brought in abruptly in 
the heat of an argument. I can never tell 
just what or just how much is meant by it. 



122 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

If the doctrine be merely a statement of the 
order and method of progress observed in his- 
tory as well as in nature, I have no serious 
quarrel with it. But if it be itself the single 
and final explanation of progress and of all 
things besides, then I grow dizzy over it and 
fail to get hold of the explanation at all. It 
hardly seems quite complete even as a state- 
ment of the method of progress. There are 
gaps and chasms in the observable line of human 
history which, after all such explanation, throw 
us back upon the depths and the riches of a 
Divine purpose and a Divine energy. 

B. Who ever heard of such rampant ortho- 
doxy ! You make everything bend or break 
to give glory to God. Even gaps and blem- 
ishes must magnify Him, dragons and all deeps 
praise Him. If there had been steady progress, 
increasing good everywhere, it might be evolu- 
tion. But, because we have black unfathomable 
chasms yawning horribly between the fairer 
tracts of our history, there must be a Divine 
purpose in it all ! 

C. The Divine purpose and presence would 
have been a much better final explanation than 
mere evolution even if there had been uniform 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 123 

progress visible everywhere. For evolution 
alone gives a bare method, and no power to 
work the method, a tolerable road to travel 
but no propelling force. Still, with all things 
steadily prospering, evolution, such as it is, 
might cover the whole field. It would explain 
nothing finally. But it might stretch over all 
the ground, and be as good in one place as in 
another. But now evolution cannot even cover 
the ground. It sinks out of sight and dies a 
thousand deaths in the " black chasms." 

B. That is where you make your great mis- 
take. Evolution need not perish in any chasm. 
The chasm itself may be a necessary stage in 
its advance, and the cliff on the other side the 
next stage. Good may be the goal of evil, and 
evil again the goal of good, and so on without 
end. Thus mere evolution, though it may not 
suit man's aspiring hopes and longings as well 
as a Divine purpose would, seems to fit the 
actual facts of the world much better. There 
is no natural antagonism between it and the 
evil that is in the world. It need have no 
scruples at all. It requires no vindications or 
apologies of any sort. Its tortuous ways need 
not be justified to gods or men. It has no 



124 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

character either of wisdom or of holiness to be 
maintained. And therefore it can afford to 
plunge into the deepest pits and to wade leis- 
urely through the filthiest quagmires of nature 
and of history much better than an intelligent 
and moral purpose can. 

A. Really there is more in evolution than I 
thought. It seems to be a sort of ubiquitous 
and everlasting salamander. It is at home in 
all the elements, in fire and in water, in good 
and in evil, in life and growth and in perdition. 
Nothing can come amiss to it. Its only fault 
seems to be its appalling tameness. Though at 
home everywhere, it is everywhere the same 
flat, slow, spiritless incubus, powerless to move 
a step freely, dragged along hither and thither 
by fate. Even its superiority to moral consid- 
erations is a " good dulness," if good at all. It 
is as irrational as it is immoral. And as it 
creeps along from good to evil and from evil to 
good with its eternal indifference, one gets 
tired of it and wishes that it were hot or cold. 
Of course it explains, in its own way, all ascer- 
tained facts, and many that are not ascertained ; 
and, without a doubt, it would explain the 
facts just as well if they were all the very re- 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 125 

verse of what they are. But if any guess that 
seems to fit the more obtrusive facts of history 
is what we are after, what need have we of this 
sluggish salamander? We can fit the facts as 
well and better with another beast of older re- 
nown and not a whit more fabulous. Say that 
the world is a dependency of the bottomless 
pit, and that the will of Satan is the origin of 
all things and the end of history. He chooses 
and loves evil for its own sake. Hence all the 
evil that is in the world. But there is nothing 
tame about him. He is a keen sportsman ; and 
he knows how to preserve his game as well as 
how to snare and destroy it. He raises up 
good men upon the earth. He makes wide 
provinces tributary to righteousness. He 
builds churches and supports missionaries. He 
promises a millennium of holiness and peace 
on earth, and a heaven of everlasting rest to 
crown all. He excites spiritual longings and 
encourages blessed hopes in the minds of men 
that he may exult and revel in greater havoc at 
the last. Any temporary triumphs of evil are 
rehearsals for his great day ; and any apparent 
victories of grace are preparations for the same. 
Death must have life to feed on. Evil must 



126 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

have good to mock and destroy. There is, 
happily, no positive support for this detestable 
philosophy of history. But we only desire to 
fit the more clamorous facts of the world : and 
this grotesque hypothesis fits them better than 
bare evolution, because it supplies motive 
power in the diabolic will. 

B. There is, alas ! altogether too much posi- 
tive support for the diabolic view of history. 
In truth the evidence for it is, in quality and in 
strength, very much like the evidence for a 
divine purpose. That is the most perplexing 
fact in the whole case. Just as you may say : 
There is much good visible in history ; there- 
fore goodness is supreme, there is a God who 
rules and who will bring forth judgment ; so 
another may reply : The evil in history is 
as conspicuous as the good, therefore evil is the 
origin and the ground and the end of all, there 
is no God, Satan is the prince of this world ! 
But evolution can use the good and the evil 
alike. All is grist that comes to its mill. The 
theory is irrational, of course. But that is its 
strength. It gives up the rational account of 
the world for lack of sufficient proof, and sub- 
stitutes for it an account which is all but self- 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 127 

evident, being in fact neither more nor less 
than a generalized statement of the process of 
the world as actually observed. 

C. You say that an evolution indifferent to 
moral good and evil fits the facts of history 
though it may not suit the aspiring hopes and 
longings of men. But the hopes and aspira- 
tions of men are facts of history, and facts of 
supreme importance. A doctrine which pro- 
vides adequately for them, though it should 
involve the recognition of incomprehensible 
mysteries, must be nearer the truth than one 
which eludes difficulties by an immoral and in- 
human attitude towards good and evil. Moral 
good is a supreme end for man as man. It 
cannot cease to be so. Any indications of the 
existence of a moral purpose in history over 
and above that in our individual lives are not 
to be suspected as, in the nature of things, 
likely to be misleading. They are not to be 
given up hastily in view of serious difficulties. 
They are just what we should look for and 
welcome and cling to as long as possible, as 
most likely to be true. Such indications are, 
in fact, numerous and strong. The persistent 
moral guidance in history is even more unmis- 



128 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

takable than the moral purpose in individual 
lives. In the individual life the moral pur- 
pose maybe arrested and defeated. In history 
it rises unharmed after every apparent fall and 
reigns secure in the midst of enmity and con- 
tradiction. It puts its enemies under its feet, 
and out of all their evil still finds means of 
good. 

B. A certain moral tendency there undoubt- 
edly is in all history, and likewise a most fla- 
grant and irrepressible immoral tendency. The 
immoral tendency is as vigorous to-day as it 
was before the deluge. It is easy to assert that 
the moral purpose reigns secure in the midst 
of its enemies. And it is just as easy to assert, 
on the other hand, that the moral purpose in 
history (if purpose it must be called) is a total 
failure, being opposed and baffled in every age 
and in all parts of the world unto this day. In- 
stead of accomplishing a great moral purpose 
or reaching any definite issue, history as a 
whole seems to be always opening out into 
new complications and never coming to any 
point at all. 

C. But it always appears to feel the check 
and control of an unchanging moral Being. 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 129 

The very failure ever perpetuated perpetuates 
also the sense of that of which we fail or fall 
short. The failures of men through all gener- 
ations emphasize the abiding presence of God 
and the persistence of His purpose, which, 
though opposed, is not annulled. There is also 
a limit to moral evil upon earth, as to physical 
suffering. History goes on, and moral evil may 
seem to go on with it, from age to age without 
a break. But the evil agents are arrested and 
sent to their account at the end of threescore 
years and ten. If history never comes entirely 
to a point here, that is because its culminating 
point is in another world. The very failure of 
a final issue upon earth only points to the 
solemn issue beyond the veil. 

B. But let the moral tendency in history be 
ever so secure, by what light is the tendency 
made out to be a purpose, the purpose of a 
personal God ? 

C. Let us not dispute about words. Let us 

drop both tendency and purpose if you like, 

and look the facts of history squarely in the 

face. We find at once that there is order in 

them, an order which we recognize as akin to 

the moral order of our own thoughts and lives, 
9 



130 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

and yet obviously an order which does not 
flow from the will of man. It is an order to 
which men are subject rather than an order 
which they establish. Yet it is a moral order, 
and it pervades all history. There is that in it 
which awes us and commands us, and that 
which attracts and inspires us, that also which 
searches the thoughts of our hearts and brings 
us to judgment. In other words, there is 
that in it which we must worship and serve, 
and in which we must put our trust or live 
without hope. God is in it from age to age, 
face to face with every man and with every 
people. 

But while God thus offers Himself to our 
worship directly in all history, there are special 
movements in history which reveal more clearly 
the life and character of the Divinity whose pres- 
ence is felt everywhere. What is specially called 
revelation is a part of history : but it is a part 
which well deserves the distinction conferred 
by the emphatic name of revelation. It openly 
declares unto us the God whose nature is but 
obscurely discovered elsewhere. 

A. You really are ready then at last to open 
your Bibles ! You have all this while deliber- 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 131 

ately kept the lamp under a bushel that you 
might enjoy the fine luxury of groping in the 
dark. For my part, I have always been con- 
tent to be a plain Bible Christian. I adore the 
Creator and Upholder of nature, the God in 
whom men live and move and have their 
being; but I am indebted for my knowledge 
of Him and for my belief in Him to the revela- 
tion of Himself which He has given us in the 
Holy Scriptures. Without this, nature would 
be dark and history would be dumb to me. 

C. I commend your love and reverence for 
the Scriptures. But you who protested against 
separating the witnesses and dividing the evi- 
dence must be on your guard here. You must 
not draw your lines too hard and fast between 
the Scriptures and the history of which we 
have been speaking. The Bible is history, an 
essential portion of universal history ; and it is 
a revelation of God unto us in virtue of that 
very fact. 

A. The Bible is history to be sure, and it 
has momentous bearings upon all history. Yet 
to me it seems a history by itself. It certainly 
reveals God unto men most gloriously by that in 
which it is most distinct from all other history. 



132 Prayer- Meeting Theology* 

C. The pre-eminence of Scripture as a part 
of human history, and as a key to the whole, is 
not to be questioned. But its separation from 
all other history would be fatal to its claims as 
a revelation unto us. If it be a real part of 
our proper history, it unveils the controlling 
power in that history, and it interprets the 
facts of to-day as well as those of former times. 
If it be, on the other hand, a history all by 
itself, it is out of our sphere. Its interest to 
us is that of a romantic legend. It deals with 
other worlds than ours. It cannot reveal God 
unto us though it speak of Him on every page. 
It cannot prove to us that there is a God, 
though it may declare that once upon a time, 
for a certain peculiar people, there was One. 
It does not deal with our world or our time or 
our life. It has no serious or practical meaning 
to us at all. But all this only shows the utter 
absurdity of the supposition. For the Bible is 
the most serious and practical book we have. 
It touches and searches our life in all its rela- 
tions as no other book does. It is the most 
broadly and distinctively human history ever 
written. The great elements of man's history 
are all there. Let us turn to it and see how it 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 133 

will help us in the question before us. What 
evidence does the Bible furnish to prove the 
being of God, to prove the being of such a God 
as it speaks of throughout ? 

B. There you touch the sore place. The 
Bible does not attempt to prove the being of 
the God it speaks of. It begs or assumes the 
whole question from the first. It begins at 
once to talk about God as if all men knew 
Him familiarly and saw Him every day. Its 
positiveness and verisimilitude, or perhaps I 
should say its divine power and authority, 
keep us a long time from asking for any proofs. 
But when we do ask, we are told by our 
spiritual guides that there is a God, because 
the Bible says so ; and that the Bible is to be 
believed because there is a God who has 
inspired it : or that there is a God because 
none but God could work the Bible miracles, 
and that the Bible record of miracles is per- 
fectly credible because there exists an om- 
nipotent and benevolent God to work such 
miracles for the benefit of mankind. 

C. That is an awkward statement. But 
the circle is less vicious than it looks. We 
believe that there is a God because the 



134 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

Bible says so ; and we believe the Bible 
because it is the Word of God. That is sub- 
stantially what we have already found in 
nature and in history. We believe that there 
is a God because God Himself says there is — 
that is to say, because God is revealing Him- 
self unto us. That is not so unreasonable. 

B. Far be it from me to say that it is unreason- 
able. Yet I would fain see its reasonableness 
more clearly. I believe in God, and in the 
Bible revelation of God, because I am captured 
and spell-bound rather than because I am taught 
to ground my faith warily on solid proofs. And 
believing under a spell, all the while knowing 
that you are under a spell, is like dreaming 
when you are awake and know that you are 
dreaming. My spell-bound faith is often bold 
and strong ; but it keeps the viper brood of 
doubts always warm in its own bosom. 

A. There is no help for you. To convince 
you is not enough. You must see how it is 
done all the way through. And it must be 
done in a manner to suit your delicate fancy. 
If you received the very proofs which you 
demand, you would still cry out for proofs of 
the proofs in an infinite series. Why will you 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 135 

not see that there must be a beginning some- 
where, that everything that is most real to us 
must be traced at last to a " spell M ? All knowl- 
edge is a spell which we can neither account 
for nor break. Our very life is an intangible, 
unapproachable dream-island in the midst of 
our waking thoughts. We are " captured and 
spell-bound " and made to live and think, we 
know not how, even as you are made to feel 
the truth of the revelation of God in the Bible. 
As you consent to live without solving the 
mystery of life, and to think without unravel- 
ling the process of thought, so yield to the 
Divine spell by which God would fix your atten- 
tion to His living presence in His word. Yield 
to it without reserve, and you will need no 
further proof of the being of God. Refuse to 
yield, turn away from His presence to look for 
new proofs of His being, and no proofs will 
avail. You reject the face of God which is gra- 
ciously turned to you, and you seek to get into 
the thick darkness behind His back. You will 
not have Him as He mercifully condescends to 
visit you ; you must mount up to His seat and 
take Him by storm in your own way. 

B. Have I not said that I should be glad to 



136 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

yield to the spell by which I find God in the 
Bible ? And have you not said that there are 
plenty of other spells which it is vain to resist ? 
If the spell which makes the Scriptures seem to 
be God's own voice were all, I should be at per- 
fect peace. But I am under another spell 
which compels me to think that the question 
of the being of God, when once proposed to the 
mind, is a question which the mind cannot 
refer back to any dim instincts or feelings how- 
ever deep, but must determine within itself and 
on its own rational grounds. And I must con- 
fess again that I do not find in the Bible the 
help which I need to demonstrate to myself 
that such a God as is therein spoken of with 
overpowering force and beauty really does exist. 
The Bible takes this for granted. The being 
of God is not the conclusion but the starting- 
point of the Bible. How can I follow the great 
book in its glorious course if I cannot start 
with it ? And how can I get up so high and 
make the start ? How does the Bible help me 
to make once for all its own mighty assump- 
tion ? 

C. A says that there is no help for you ; and 
perhaps he is right. Perhaps you ask too much, 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 137 

more than even the Bible can give. Perhaps 
you seek not faith in God but actual sight of 
the Invisible. That, of course, is not to be ob- 
tained in the Bible or elsewhere. The existence 
of God is betokened unto us on every hand in 
and out of Scripture. The appeal, however, is 
not to the eye, or to the bare understanding, 
but to the heart as well, to the conscience also, 
to the whole man in his fullest life. The dim 
sense of God's awful presence we have without 
seeking. If we are to know Him further, it 
must be by a deeper, fuller, more personal act 
than the drawing of a necessary conclusion from 
formal premises. It must be by an act of ac- 
ceptance or consent or submission, by an act 
of serious acknowledgment and trust and self- 
committal, — in a word, by faith. You seem to 
demand such proofs as would dispense with 
faith rather than justify and confirm it. You 
would apparently superannuate faith and install 
scientific knowledge in its place. If that be 
your aim and desire, you will find neither help 
nor countenance in the Scriptures. The Bible 
offers no substitute for personal faith in God, 
and will hear of no substitute. But, taken as a 
whole, it is itself a complete vindication of the 



138 Prayer-Meeting Theology. 

reasonableness of faith. It leads you up to the 
high mount of speculation from which faith 
can best rise to its solitary flight. 

A. Now you confess the futility of your long 
babbling. In the end we must commit our- 
selves in pure trust to the revelation of God, 
which is offered not to the understanding alone 
but to our moral nature as well, not to the wise 
and prudent only but also unto babes. We 
cannot see God, look for Him where we will. 
Whatever we may see, whatever we may know, 
we must believe in God, as a moral Being, by a 
moral act, by a voluntary, energetic, spiritual 
advance beyond all bare evidence and beyond 
all merely intellectual use of evidence. We 
are not to search for faith. We must have 
faith. We must ourselves believe. Believing 
in God is a moral and religious duty in our 
actual state of knowledge, not the acquisition 
of new knowledge. Keeping the faith is cling- 
ing resolutely to it, wrestling with it, not by 
subtlety but by main force, saying unto it, " I 
will not let thee go till thou bless me." But 
pardon me for keeping you so long from the 
Bible after you have compassed sea and land 
to get to it. After your open confession, I 



Prayer-Meeting Theology. 139 

am curious to know what sort of proofs of 
the being of God you will still find in the 
old book. 

C. I will confess again, if you like, that we 
do not find in Holy Scripture a scientific dem- 
onstration of the being of God to take the 
place of a spiritual faith in Him. But as every- 
where else, and far more than elsewhere, we 
find solemn signs of God's presence ; we find 
fit opportunity and due encouragement for a 
free, personal, perpetual act of faith. 

B. Will you let us hear just what you do 
find ? We shall then know better how much 
encouragement we have for faith. 

C. First of all, do not forget, there is that 
" spell " of which you have spoken. It has 
prevailed from the beginning until now. It 
held minds of every order in the darkest ages. 
It holds them still in all the splendor of our 
enlightenment. It never quailed before the 
gigantic violence of the old scoffers. It takes 
no notice when our own polished prophets 
calmly summon it to surrender. It simply 
holds its way, through evil report and good 
report, subduing the strong, and taking the 
wise in their own craftiness, and turning the 



140 Prayer-Meeting Theology. 

learned counsel of unbelievers into foolishness. 
And, whilst it humbles the proud, it lifts up 
them that are cast down and exalts the poor to 
the princely freedom of the life of faith. You 
have yourself acknowledged its power. It does 
not satisfy you as evidence, because it looks 
like power usurping the place of evidence. 
Yet it must be considered even as evidence. 
For whence comes this mighty spell ? And 
what is it if not the involuntary response of 
the human spirit to the self-revealing God? 
This it may well be. This to many it has 
clearly appeared to be. And, until this inter- 
pretation of it is precluded, it must remain a 
strong presumptive proof that it is the living 
God Himself who speaks to mankind through 
the Scriptures with an authority befitting His 
Majesty. 

Then again, as the Bible is a part of history, 
it proves the being of God as history in general 
does. It multiplies and diversifies instances of 
belief in Him. It unfolds the effects of the 
belief and its profound relations to all the life 
of man. And it reveals the unity of purpose 
in history both by its own wondrous unity and 
by the freedom and mastery with which it 



Prayer-Meeting Theology. 14] 

assumes a central position in the history and 
progress of the world. 

A. All that is very true. The Bible is one, 
though it is a collection of fragments in various 
tongues gathered together as if by accident in 
different parts of the world through a period of 
many centuries. Without unity of form, or of 
style, or of matter, or of immediate purpose, it 
still has a spiritual unity, which is felt by the 
plainest reader and acknowledged with awe and 
wonder by the profoundest, and which cannot 
be conjured away by any pedantry or arrogance 
of criticism. In the words and the thoughts of 
many men, we have here doubtless the Word 
and the Spirit of the living God, calling to the 
entire human race. The Bible is at home in 
every land and in the tongue and heart of every 
people. It is the proclamation and the proof of 
the unity of history. It marks the converging 
lines of the divine purpose amidst the raging 
of the heathen and the tumult of the people. 
The Bible instances of faith and its victories 
are also good evidence of the being of God. 
But is it not more to our purpose to ask how 
these men came to believe in God, than even 
what fruit their faith bore? If we find how 



142 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

they came to believe, will not that give us the 
real ground which the Bible furnishes for faith ? 

C. Well, then, how came they to believe in 
God? They believed in Him surely because 
He revealed Himself unto them. But how did 
He reveal Himself unto them ? Even as He 
reveals Himself unto all men, through the 
works of nature, through the operations of their 
own minds and consciences, through the various 
relationships of life, through duties and trials, 
through judgments and deliverances and all the 
course of His providence. 

A. Through all these things doubtless. But 
the divine handling of these things for their 
benefit must have been most signal. 

C. Yes, and it is most signal for our benefit 
also. But they accepted the sign, and we ask 
for a greater. 

A. Yet surely there was more than nature 
and events and their own thoughts to teach 
them. There was the direct inspiration of 
God. 

C. Certainly. Otherwise, nature and events 
would have been to them signs signifying 
nothing. Nature and events do not speak. It 
is God who breathes and speaks through them. 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 143 

The good men of old were taught by the in- 
spiration of God ; and so are we, through 
whatsoever instrumentality He may choose. 

A. Yes, I see your drift. The inspiration of 
the holy men who worked miracles and wrote 
the Scriptures differed only in degree from the 
inspiration of those who are mighty in com- 
merce and politics, and science and literature 
in our time ! 

C. So far as I can see, there is not necessarily 
a difference even in degree. The difference is 
in modes of operation, in the particular ends in 
view, and accordingly in results. 

A. So that contemporary inspiration is pro- 
ducing new Bibles all the time, and it matters 
little which of them one reads and lives by ! 

C. By no means. Every man is inspired for 
his own life and work. The Bible is not to 
be written at this time of day. Hence none 
are inspired to write new Bibles any more than 
to write new Iliads. The work of Christians 
to-day is very different. But it is not less 
arduous or less sacred. And those who will 
set themselves with all their hearts to fulfil 
their heaven-appointed course may look for the 
very highest inspiration, the inspiration of the 



144 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

one living and true God, to guide and support 
them in thought and in action. There are 
diversities of operation, but one Spirit. 

A. You put it plausibly, in approved Scripture 
phrase ; but I am afraid that you are taking 
the very ground of the worst enemies of the 
Christian faith. 

C. And why should I not, if the ground be 
solid? Why should a foot of good ground be 
abandoned to the infidel? This, I am sure, is 
good ground : that God is teaching men to-day 
by His Spirit through many instrumentalities ; 
and that He taught the men of old in great 
measure through the same instrumentalities 
and altogether by the same Spirit. 

B. That is plain and weighty so far as it 
goes ; but it does not go very far towards a 
right estimate of the word of God. You 
occupy hostile territory with a right loyal in- 
tention. But do you not necessarily fall into 
the enemy's power, and are you not naturally 
pressed into the enemy's service, on such 
ground, after all ? Do you not in effect re- 
duce the Bible to the level of other good 
books, and divest its teaching of all special 
authority? 



Prayer-Meeting Theology. 145 

C. The Bible was made long ago. It is not 
given unto us to make or unmake it. We 
need not trouble ourselves to separate it from 
other books. It is separate enough. We need 
not go beyond our depth to explain its unique- 
ness or to sustain its authority. Its uniqueness 
is apparent to all. Its authority is like that of 
heaven itself. It may be set aside, but it can- 
not be questioned. If we had to support and de- 
fend the Bible, it would be a millstone about our 
necks instead of a lamp for our feet. Instead of 
helping us, it would increase our difficulties a 
hundred-fold. We have need of its help, but 
it has no need of ours. Let us have done with 
patronizing and protecting the Scriptures, and 
let us set ourselves to learn what they have to 
teach us concerning the being and nature of God. 

B. But, pray, do let us know what you mean. 
Do you mean to say that it is impertinent to 
make sure of the trustworthiness of a teacher 
before we place ourselves implicitly under his 
guidance ? Or do you privately mean that 
with regard to the Bible it is impossible to 
obtain any such assurance, and that, therefore, 
we must listen to what it says, and make of it 
whatever we can, and ask no questions? 



146 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

C. You cannot answer all manner of prelimi- 
nary questions about the Bible before you let 
the Bible speak for itself. And if you study it 
seriously and devoutly first of all, you may find 
what you most need at once, and be able to 
postpone the preliminary questions indefinitely. 

B. But answer me this. Is the truth or 
falsehood of the Bible a light and irrelevant 
question which may be postponed indefinitely 
without affecting the practical value of the 
book? 

C. Certainly not. It is a vital question. But 
it is a question which can never trouble any 
serious reader. The answer is known before 
the question can be asked. The Bible is a true 
book on the face of it. It is too great, too 
serious, too searching and far-reaching, too 
vital and fruitful, too inspiring, to be anything 
but true. You cannot look it in the face and 
question its truth. To speak ill or to think ill 
of it, you must close the book and avert your 
eyes and harden your heart. 

B. But you shall not thus escape me. An- 
swer once more. Are all the historical and 
other statements of the Bible absolutely and 
infallibly correct ? Are they, or are they not ? 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 147 

C. What is the matter with you? How can 
I tell ? I have never thought of setting myself 
to consider such a question. And I am not 
competent to do it. There is no way to prove 
the absolute infallible correctness of Scripture 
without verifying all its statements one by one 
from the first to the last. 

B. Yes, there is a totally different way. But 
you are plainly giving up the truth of the Bible 
after all your panegyrics. You are ready to 
lay down the arms of the Christian Church 
meekly without waiting for the enemy to come 
and take them. You admit that the Bible is 
inaccurate in its statements. 

C. Pardon me, I made no such admission. I 
never looked for inaccuracies in the Bible. If 
any one else chooses to look for them, and if 
he finds them or thinks that he finds them, he 
can take them for his pains and enjoy them 
unmolested by me. 

B. And you will still calmly maintain that 
the Bible is a true book, I suppose. 

C. Certainly. Have you never known any 
true books ? If you know any true history for 
instance, will you vouch for its strict accuracy 
in every detail ? If you discover a single error 



148 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

in it, must you pronounce the book false and 
untrustworthy? The trustworthiness and prac- 
tical value of a book do not depend on infallible 
accuracy. I see no sound reason why we should 
look for such infallibility in the Bible anymore 
than in other great books. I am aware of no 
important purpose to be served by it if it be a 
fact. And I see no way in the world to prove 
the fact if fact it be. The only way would be 
to verify every single statement in the whole 
Bible ; and it is plain that no one will under- 
take to do that. 

B. As I said before, there is a totally differ- 
ent way. Christian people generally satisfy 
themselves that the Bible is Divinely inspired ; 
and its Divine inspiration is to them a guarantee 
of its infallibility. Your view of the inspiration 
of Scripture, I believe, is the view of the enemy, 
and is compatible with error as to facts, and 
most probably as to doctrine also. 

C. If the enemy believe in God, and believe 
that the Bible writers were truly inspired by 
Him, I am glad to know it, and I heartily 
agree with them. And if " Christian people 
generally " assume that the inspiration of the 
Scriptures guarantees their historical and 



Prayer -Meeting Theology, 149 

scientific infallibility, I cannot see how they 
will make good their assumption unless they 
are prepared to assert that the Almighty can- 
not inspire a man at all without making him in 
every respect infallible, or that His purpose in 
giving us the Scriptures must have been one 
which could not be attained without making 
them infallibly accurate in all their details. I 
cannot presume to make either of those asser- 
tions. I believe that God inspires thousands 
whom He does not make infallible ; and I be- 
lieve that the purpose of the Bible, the purpose 
which it is actually answering on a grand scale, 
— the revelation of God as a God of salvation 
to mankind, does not depend in any degree on 
the kind of infallibility so much insisted on. I 
do not take it upon me to deny this infallibility 
to be a fact ; but, whether it be a fact or not, 
I deny the necessity of assuming it apart from 
its proper evidence, and I deplore the singular 
indiscretion of those good Christians who, on 
this doubtful and impracticable point, would 
stake all the authority of Holy Writ. 

B. But what is revelation good for if it is 
not infallible ? And if it is not infallible in all 
its parts, how can we trust it in any ? 



150 Prayer-Meeting Theology. 

C. What are your eyes and your ears good 
for if they are not infallible ? And if they ever 
mislead you in any particular, how can you 
trust them again in anything at all? Since 
your eyes have made a myth of the starry 
heavens will they not be sure to make a 
comedy of errors, if not a tragedy, of your 
domestic life? In reference to the universe at 
large, our vision is limited and imperfect, and 
must be supplemented and corrected by the 
ever-growing resources of science. But our 
eyes answer a great purpose nevertheless ; and 
few have ever deemed them unworthy of an 
all-wise Creator. If God, then, without detri- 
ment to our happiness or to His own glory, 
could give us a fallible representation of the 
remote in space, why should we expect Him to 
give us an infallible account of the remote in 
time? The Holy Scriptures, infallible or not 
in the disputed sense, answer their own pur- 
pose perfectly. In the sense of sufficiency 
for their proper purpose they are strictly 
infallible. The word of God shall not return 
unto Him void. 

A. I know that it is useless for me to meddle 
with the stream of your disputation, which is 



Prayer-Meeting Theology, 151 

running its appointed course, and which noth- 
ing in the world can turn aside. But there is 
something astonishing to me in the ease with 
which you make out that God revealed Him- 
self to the sacred writers in ordinary ways just 
as He reveals Himself unto us in nature and 
providence. If that be really so, can the ques- 
tion of the accuracy of the Bible be limited to 
minute unimportant details ? Must it not be 
raised in reference to the general tenor of the 
main narrative ? To me the Bible seems to 
speak chiefly of a miraculous revelation of 
God to men. Have the miracles disappeared 
from the sacred text as you read it ? Or, with- 
out disappearing, have they lost all their 
significance ? If the miraculous history is false, 
can the Bible be true ? If the miraculous his- 
tory is true, have we not therein a mode of 
revelation which itself constitutes new and 
telling evidence of the being of God ? Are 
not the miracles, in fact, the very substance of 
the Scripture revelation, and the very evidence 
which you went forth to seek? 

C. I have not lost sight of the miracles of 
Scripture or of their great significance. There 
was a time when these miracles could be ap- 



152 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

pealed to as direct evidence of the being and 
operation of God. But to-day the belief in 
God is more necessary to support belief in 
miracles than the belief in miracles to support 
belief in God. The miracles still prove and 
teach much when we can assume the being of 
God. But when we seek evidence of the exist- 
ence of God, the miracles of long ago are now 
for the most part unavailable. 

B. Alas ! my brother and companion in 
tribulation, your great fortitude and cheerful- 
ness leave the situation still very depressing. 
The miracles are supposed to be facts, well- 
attested, and all on our side. They are sup- 
posed to shut every unbelieving mouth and 
end all controversy. They are the boast and 
glory of the faithful. But you are anxious to 
keep them entirely out of sight for the present. 
For the time being, you wish to silence your 
own chief witnesses. Are you sure that a more 
convenient season to hear them will ever come ? 
Would it not be a relief to you to be, " like the 
nations round," without the help or the hin- 
drance of any miracles at all ? With all your 
admirable composure, are you not really panic- 
stricken before the modern sages who have 



Prayer-Meeting Theology. 153 

authoritatively declared that miracles are in- 
credible or even impossible ? 

C. The authority of to-day's sages is no 
greater than that of yesterday's ; and in their 
pronouncements I see no occasion for fortitude 
or for panic. The opposition to the great Bible 
miracles is always on the same ultimate ground. 
The argument against them, however tersely 
or strikingly or brilliantly stated, is always 
childish in substance. Here are a few samples, 
as robust as I could find : 

1. The story of the miracles is not true, be- 
cause miracles are impossible. 

2. The story, true or false, must be reckoned 
false, because the spread of false reports is 
more probable than the occurrence of real 
miracles. 

3. Say what you will, the story is of no 
account, because the scientific spirit of the age 
will not listen to it. 

A miracle is indeed improbable and incredi- 
ble and even impossible, if there is no one to 
work it. But if there is a God who can work 
miracles when He chooses, how can miracles be 
impossible ? If there is a God who, under the 
given circumstances, would not be unlikely to 



154 Prayer-Meeting Theology. 

work the greatest miracles of Holy Writ, why 
are these particular miracles not perfectly 
credible ? If the proof in favor of the greatest 
Scripture miracles seems very strong to those 
who believe in God, why should the levity and 
self-conceit, or the worldly one-sided culture, or 
the radical infidelity of the so-called spirit of 
the age be allowed to invalidate it ? In con- 
sidering the question of the being of God 
before and apart from the Scripture miracles, 
we neither abandon nor depreciate the miracu- 
lous history. We do but follow the true order 
for our own time. It is right and necessary to 
begin with that which is nearest to us, with 
that which we can best get hold of. And the 
childish argument against miracles on the 
ground of their impossibility or incredibility is 
the snare in which those are justly caught who 
take things by the wrong end and will have 
miracles first and God last. 

B. You promise, then, that you will return 
to the miracles again? 

C. Why should you insist on that? Our 
inquiry is about the being of God. If we find 
reason to believe in the God of the Bible, there 
will be no difficulty about the miracles. 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 155 

B. Then tell us what you find in the Bible to 
help you to believe in the being of God. You 
have already noticed such proofs as the Bible 
furnishes in common with other history. Now 
set forth the evidence which goes beyond com- 
mon history and is peculiar to the Bible. 

C. You have pulled me about so much be- 
tween you that I have lost some links of the 
train of thought which I had in view ; and 
there is no time to recover them now. I hear 
noises down below which intimate to the 
practised ear that we may at any moment be 
invaded and carried away captive to wholly 
untheological regions downstairs. But I may 
say this. I find in the men of the Bible not 
only an assured conviction of the being of God 
but also a full persuasion of what John Howe 
calls " God's conversableness with men." In 
fact their belief in Him was not the tranquil 
acceptance of a traditional doctrine or of a 
reasoned conclusion. It was the awful, unmis- 
takable, ever-burning impression of the actual 
contact and communion of their souls with the 
Eternal Spirit. When they speak of God they 
do not string together a cento of opinions or a 
chain of arguments ; they speak in all sim- 



156 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

plicity out of the fulness of a real experience. 
They give us literature rather than dogma 
inasmuch as they speak with freedom and fer- 
vor rather than with labored precision. But they 
give us dogma also inasmuch as their freedom 
and their fervor were inspired not by play of the 
imagination but by actual personal communion 
with the Holy One. The dogmatic theology 
implied in their utterances is a substantial 
token of the objective reality of their com- 
munion with God, as their life-long labor of love 
and obedience is a token of their personal sin- 
cerity. This theology, so bold that it often seems 
reckless and about to fall into the pit of Aber- 
glaube, is so bold because it carries, in such 
vessels as human speech affords, a treasure of 
divine knowledge, which has been gained in 
living converse with God, and which may be 
put to the proof day by day as long as the 
world stands. The Bible saints were not merely 
believers in God ; they were servants and 
friends of God. And they took not this honor 
upon themselves lightly. They were servants 
and friends of God by a serious and definite 
covenant, in which they relinquished all self- 
will and accepted the Divine loving-kindness as 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 157 

better than life itself. They proclaimed to the 
world the growing revelation of God's covenant 
with them and with mankind. They declared 
His Name, and the service which He required, 
and the promises which He made. They raised 
among their people a great expectation of a 
fuller manifestation of God and His will. They 
strengthened and quickened this hope from age 
to age amidst the greatest discouragements 
from without. They gave a wonderfully close 
and correct forecast of the coming blessing. 
And at last they pointed out the fulfilment of 
God's great promise in the person and work of 
Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. They 
called upon all men everywhere to accept God's 
covenant now fully revealed, and to taste and 
see the riches of his power and grace. From 
that time unto this, all the world over, those 
who obey the call have access unto God ; and 
the reality of the Divine Object of their faith 
is a matter of personal experience. 

Thus the Bible offers in evidence of the 
being of God : first, the witness of many 
generations of good men who lived in the 
light of the Unseen ; and who, from the ful- 
ness of the revelation vouchsafed unto them, 



158 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

have given to the world in brief occasional 
fragments the great, coherent, and vital body 
of theology, which all the schools have but 
trimmed and draped without adding one cubit 
to its stature, and which to-day is everywhere 
spoken against and everywhere widening its 
sway and deepening its hold upon the minds of 
men : secondly, the fulfilment in the Christian 
dispensation, both at its beginning and in its 
progress, of the great prophecy of which the 
older dispensation in all its parts was a con- 
tinual embodiment : thirdly, and above all, 
the opportunity to make personal trial of the 
great matter. "God is here," the Bible says, 
" He reveals Himself thus. Thus will He be 
inquired after. Prove Him now." The full 
weight of the Scripture evidence for the being 
of God is felt not in Scripture alone but in 
Scripture as attested and illustrated in all 
Christian history. And it can be properly 
estimated in no other way than by the humble 
and serious personal proof so urgently recom- 
mended and so uniformly found satisfactory. 
Men will see round a corner and through a 
solid stone wall with the bodily eyes sooner 
than they will perceive the solemn realities 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 159 

of Scripture without the contrite, earnest, 
obedient heart to which the grace of faith is 
given. 

B. This leads us to speak of Jesus Christ. 
As everything really depends on Him, perhaps 
we may now leave all besides and devote what 
time we have remaining to speak of Him. I 
should not have quarrelled with your view of 
the Scriptures if I did not greatly fear its bear- 
ing upon Him of whom we are told that Moses 
and all the prophets did write. Harassed and 
wearied by the strife which fills our days, I 
grow more and more indifferent to much that 
I once held to be all-important. But if a stand 
is to be made anywhere, if we are to keep the 
faith at all, we must hold our ground without 
compromise in reference to the person and 
work of our Lord Jesus Christ. On the in- 
tegrity of our faith in Him will depend hence- 
forth our faith in God. If we believe in the 
Son, we shall believe in the Father also. But 

if our faith in Christ as the Eternal Son of God 

• 

fails in the worldly turmoil around us, all real 
faith in God will be at an end. Men believed 
in God more or less firmly before Christ came, 
it is true. But they believed in hope, looking 



160 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

for a fuller justification of their faith. When 
Christ came, He certainly came either to fulfil 
or to destroy this hope. Since the advent of 
Christ, it has become impossible to look for 
another to come after Him with a diviner mis- 
sion, or to look for any other justification of 
our faith in God. If we cannot look forward 
for another Christ, we certainly cannot go back 
and live on the old types, which once prophesied 
good things to come, but which were either 
fulfilled or discredited for ever in Jesus of 
Nazareth. He is the author and finisher and 
also the object of our faith, or in the coming 
time there is no faith to be. Feeling thus 
the gravity of the question about the person 
of Christ, I cannot but fear lest any doubts 
concerning the infallibility of Scripture should 
let in doubt upon the centre of our faith, the 
Incarnation of the Son of God. I appreciate 
the difficulty of maintaining the strict infalli- 
bility of the Scriptures in all details. I cannot 
maintain it to any purpose myself. But I 
shudder at the thought of giving it up because I 
feel that the Scriptures and the Christ of whom 
they testify must, in our minds, stand or fall 
together. 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 161 

C. Christ and the Scriptures are intimately 
connected. They bear witness of Him. And 
herein, in their true sphere and at their proper 
task, they are infallible ; that is, they are suffi- 
cient, they serve the purpose effectively as wit- 
nesses. Men and women believe in Christ 
through their witness every day. But their 
witness to Him does not consist in microscopic 
details and subtle infinitesimal points. It is 
writ plain and large, in elemental characters ; and 
there is no evading or gainsaying it. It asks 
no favor of the New Criticism. It needs not 
the protection of the Old. It depends on no 
disputed authorship, or controverted date, or 
doubtful principle of interpretation. In the 
way of criticism, all it asks us to believe is, that 
the Old Testament is older than the New ; 
that the prophets preceded the apostles ; that 
the Law was before the Gospel ; that Jesus 
Christ Himself is the chief corner-stone bind- 
ing the old and the new together. In the 
most perilous times yet to come there will 
hardly arise a school of history or of criti- 
cism to dispute these statements. Yet these 
simple statements involve for Jesus Christ a 
position such as never any other man occupied 



1 62 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

or approached. Christ's place in history is 
absolutely unique and secure, so secure and so 
exalted that it is hard to conceive what more 
you could gain or seek for Him through any 
historical or scientific or other infallibility of 
Scripture. 

B. I know that Jesus Christ must for ever 
occupy an incomparable, unapproachable place 
in the history and in the thoughts of men. 
But the strict infallibility of Scripture would 
add definiteness to the supremacy of His posi- 
tion, making it, for me at least, as unmistak- 
able as the Nicene formula itself makes it. 
The full authority of literal infallibility being 
assumed, the great statements of Scripture 
concerning Christ, such as His birth of a virgin, 
His taking away the sin of the world, His send- 
ing of the Holy Ghost, His commission to be the 
judge of all men, give Him, not only the fore- 
most place among men, but the Divine place 
accorded to Him by the adoring faith of His 
people. They once for all define His position 
and establish His Divinity beyond question 
or cavil. 

C. Do you think so? And do you think that 
any specially certified statements are necessary 



Prayer-Meeting Theology, 163 

to establish His position and His Divinity ? On 
the other hand, I feel that we are on the wrong 
track when we talk of establishing His Divinity 
at all. We thereby give countenance to the 
notion that His Divinity is something separate 
from Himself; and that we may know Him 
and miss the knowledge of His Divinity. The 
Divinity of Christ is that which is actually 
manifested in Him, and not some occult quality 
or relation to be attributed to Him and proved. 
It is through knowing Christ that we know 
most fully what Divinity is. Divinity is that 
which shines forth in Him. He is the ex- 
press image of the invisible God. He is 
God with us. They who have seen Him have 
seen the Father. His very human nature, far 
from eclipsing His Divinity, is itself mediato- 
rial, bringing us to God. His body is the 
temple of God. God meets us there. 

B. But, assuming that Christ was God mani- 
fested in the flesh, how acceptable would infal- 
lible testimony still be to deliver unto us with 
full accuracy and certainty that which was 
actually manifested in Him ! 

C. Nay, that manifestation was not a lightning 
flash, seen once for a brief season, and forever 



164 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

after known only by report and tradition. The 
light which came into the world through Jesus 
Christ came to stay. The Divinity of Christ 
is even now manifest in Him, not only as we 
read of Him in the Gospels, but also as we find 
Him still present in the world through His 
Spirit, the strength and joy of His people, the 
light and life of men, the only hope of all the 
world. 

B. There is a certain gracious influence in 
the world to-day it is true. You assume that 
it is the personal influence of the Lord Jesus, 
ever present with men through the Holy Spirit. 
But should we not be saying all we really know if 
we called it an unexplored "stream of tendency" ? 
Or if we speak of persons, may we not connect 
the " Divinity now manifest in the world " with 
many other names, Christian and Heathen, as 
well as with the name of Jesus ? 

C. The truth and grace which abound in 
Him are reflected in His people, and have been 
adumbrated from the earliest times in the 
natural life of mankind. There are many 
names to be held in everlasting remembrance, 
many memories to be for ever blessed. And 
there is much good in the world to-day which 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 165 

represents the love and toil of holy men and 
women whose very names are lost from all 
earthly records. But there is no danger that 
Jesus Christ and His work shall be lost or mis- 
taken in this saintly throng. Sooner shall men 
fail to distinguish between the morning star 
and the rising sun. Christ in the world to-day 
is as separate as He was in the days of His 
humiliation. Much of His work on earth to-day 
is as directly connected with His name, and as 
plainly His, as that which Simon Peter ascribed 
to Him with convincing power on the day of 
Pentecost, and on another occasion at the tem- 
ple in Solomon's porch. His presence in the 
world through the Spirit is now felt by myriads, 
felt and known as the personal presence of the 
Son of God as clearly and as certainly as it was 
ever known to His twelve disciples. If you 
say that we do not now see Him with the 
bodily eye, that we do not with our ears hear 
His voice, that our hands can no longer handle 
His gracious person, all that is confessedly true 
enough. But all that, far from being a diffi- 
culty in the way of faith, is plain Christian 
doctrine from the beginning. Our Lord has 
told us Himself, and his apostles have told us, 



1 66 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

that He is to be present with us and to be 
known unto us henceforth, not according to 
the flesh, but through the Spirit. If we deny 
the possibility of a personal presence being 
revealed otherwise than in a material form vis- 
ible and palpable to our bodily organs, our 
discussion is at an end, and ought never to 
have begun. But if we admit that possibility, 
I know not what conceivable element of the 
required evidence is wanting to prove the real 
presence of Christ in the world, clearly distinct 
from the world, and yet closely related to all 
the life and work of men. His peculiar work 
is going on over all the earth in the hearts of 
men. Dead souls are quickened in His name. 
To those who believe in Him all things are 
made new. His presence is recognized by His 
people ; and, as they act upon that recognition, 
it is verified more and more in a fruitful and 
blessed and ever-growing communion. 

B. I am not disposed to be flippant in such 
a matter as this. But I must say that you seem 
to have ceased arguing and to be giving us 
your religious experience. 

C. And has our religious experience no place 
in the argument? Do you expect to prove 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 167 

divine realities by a course of reasoning which 
studiously avoids contact with them ? Do you 
expect to prove them true by arguing for ever 
on the assumption that they are false, or that 
they can never be practically proved true? 

B. Religious experience has a place in the 
argument, but not the place of a tyrant. It 
must persuade by showing itself reasonable, 
and not coerce by its intensity and vehemence. 
I should not expect to prove the truth of 
Christian doctrines by arguing for ever on the 
assumption that they are false. But neither 
can I prove them true by the mere assumption 
that they are true, though the assumption may 
seem to be supported by my own religious ex- 
perience. For the experience, though real 
enough, may be capable of another explanation 
than that furnished by our traditional doctrines. 
It is this possibility that perplexes and torments 
me. I think I have long known what you call 
the personal presence of Christ ; and I endeavor 
to trust that it really is His blessed presence. 
But I know not whence you derive your posi- 
tive assurance that it can be nothing else. If 
we had the doctrine of the Supreme Divinity 
of Christ proved beforehand by infallible 



1 68 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

authority, I could rest well assured that the 
guidance and strength and comfort which we 
daily receive, and the advancement of Christian 
influence in the world, are tokens of the Lord's 
promised presence with His people. But, as 
you teach, we have no such proof of the 
Divinity of our Lord. His Divinity, you say, 
is that which was manifest in Him to His 
apostles, and that which is still manifest to 
their followers. All I can make of that is, that 
the Divinity of Christ is not His Eternal One- 
ness with God the Father, but merely that 
gracious and inspiring virtue which His dis- 
ciples witnessed in Him, and which is still 
operative in the world. In outward appear- 
ance Jesus Christ was a man. His manifest 
Divinity, then, was apparently the virtue of a 
man, — eminent, unparalleled, most fruitful 
virtue, but still the virtue of a great and glori- 
ous man only. He manifests, then, the very 
crown and glory of humanity, and no more. 
And this, for lack of more precise language, 
you call His Divinity. By the Divinity of 
Christ you simply mean the sudden bursting 
forth of Humanity in Him into a glory of 
flower and fruit never equalled before or since. 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 1 69 

The faith of the Christian Church has ever 
been in a Divine Person, uncreated, eternal, by 
whom all things were made, who, for us men 
and for our salvation, came down from heaven, 
and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the 
Virgin Mary, and was made man. You seem 
to think, with the late Dean Stanley and, alas ! 
with many more, that all this is irrelevant ; 
that the Catholic creeds " miss the point " al- 
together because they do not boldly identify 
the Divine Nature with the manifest character 
of Christ ; and that Bishop Pearson, in laboring 
to prove the Divinity of Christ in the Nicene 
sense instead of enlarging on His ethical excel- 
lence, shows himself less of a Christian theolo- 
gian than Voltaire and Rousseau, and Mill and 
Renan, who make the ethical excellence all in 
all. The truth is, where the Catholic doctrine 
of the Person of Christ is seriously held, His 
ethical excellence is a matter of course and has 
its full effect. And where the Catholic doctrine 
is rejected, though the marvellous character of 
Jesus is nervously clutched as the sole relic 
from the wreck of the Gospel, its excellence is 
impaired and its power to save completely 
gone. In the orthodox theology, as in the 



t 70 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

New Testament, the crowning grace as well as 
the saving power of the character of Christ 
appears in the fact that, though He was rich, 
yet for our sakes He became poor ; that, though 
He was equal with God, He voluntarily became 
man, and toiled and suffered and died for our 
redemption. Give up the Catholic doctrine of 
the Divinity of Christ, and this crowning grace 
of His character is lost. The human tender- 
ness and faithfulness remain ; but the Divine 
condescension and self-sacrifice for man's salva- 
tion have vanished. We may perhaps still say 
that " in Jesus was condensed all that is good 
and elevated in our nature"; and that "the 
origin of Christianity forms the most heroic 
episode of the history of humanity." But are 
we to be saved by an episode of our own sad 
history, or by the revelation of even the best 
and rarest in our own helpless nature ? If 
Christ was but a man, the uniqueness of His 
character and the solitariness of His person 
separate Him from us instead of uniting Him 
with us. And they separate Him from us, not 
measurably in amplitude of development, but 
radically in type of character, making Him, 
among men, not a rare genius but a prodigy, 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. lji 

unsuitable as an example and disqualified as a 
teacher. A real faith in Christ as our great 
example and our great teacher implies faith in 
Him as the Son of God with power to trans- 
form as well as to teach. Our hope is in God 
alone. The real question about Jesus Christ is, 
not what manner of man He was, or how strong 
and persistent His influence on mankind may 
be, but who He was and is, whether a man 
merely, of whatsoever character and influence, 
or also the Only-begotten Son of God, Him- 
self God, able to save to the uttermost all 
who come to Him. As to this fundamen- 
tal question, you seem to have little or 
nothing to say. And little or nothing can 
be said about it unless we can receive fully 
the witness of the inspiration and the miracles 
of Scripture. 

C. Then why do you not receive their wit- 
ness and be at rest ? You desire to do so, I 
know ; and the more you desire to do so all 
the greater are your misgivings. There are 
many who share both your earnest wish to be- 
lieve and your sense of failure in the attempt 
to do so. Neither you nor they can add one 
jot or tittle to the formal evidence of Christ's 



172 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

divinity, and you cannot be entirely convinced 
by it as it is. I by no means give up or dis- 
parage that evidence. I think it is very strong. 
But trying to ground our faith on it alone 
is like trying to stand on our heads. I do not 
try to stand on my head, because it is much 
easier to stand on my feet, and because, stand- 
ing on my feet, I enjoy the right and natural 
use of my head also. In like manner I have 
given up trying to stand on the mere formal 
evidence of the Christian faith, because I could 
never get beyond trying, and because I have 
found that standing on present real experience 
both removes my sense of insecurity and 
enables me to view the general evidence itself 
with far more advantage and satisfaction. Be- 
sides, your restless seeking of rest in the far- 
away historical beginnings of the Gospel seems 
to me little less than a denial of the Gospel 
itself. The Gospel promised us a Lord and 
Saviour to be with us always to the end of the 
world. If that promise fails, the Gospel fails. 
If there be no present living Christ to whom 
we can turn for support, what is the use of 
seeking Him among the dead centuries? But 
recognize Him here, and you will find Him 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, i 73 

there without any trouble. He is the same 
yesterday, to-day, and forever. 

B. You do not meet my difficulty at all. 
According to the Scripture record, Jesus Christ 
is a Divine Person, the Son of God. If we can 
but receive that record without reserve, every- 
thing is settled. We have a personal God and 
a Divine Saviour. But if we cannot stand im- 
movable on the strict letter of the record, our 
personal God and Saviour is still to seek. You 
say you find Him in the world now and always. 
I ask by what token you know Him, and you 
only reply that you assuredly do know Him. 
You recognize Him in the guidance and 
strength which come to you and to others 
every day. But these comforts come to you 
obscurely in the multitude of your thoughts. 
And may they not be your own thoughts after 
all, derived, like your other thoughts, from the 
unexplored sum of your natural conditions? I 
cannot see the steps by which you identify 
the spiritual influence of which you have ex- 
perience with the living and personal Christ. 

C. You must bear in mind that I have never 
repudiated the testimony of the evangelists 
and the apostles or that of the law and the 



1 74 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

prophets. I could not rest my faith on the 
letter of their testimony without a correspond- 
ing experience of my own. But the whole 
volume of Scripture is open for me, and I can 
use it freely as a key to my own experience if 
I find that it fits. It does fit perfectly ; and by 
means of it I can interpret that in myself and 
in the world which otherwise would have re- 
mained inscrutable. My faith does not rest on 
the Book alone, or on my personal experience 
alone. It rests on Scripture as confirmed by 
experience, and on experience as interpreted 
and guided by Scripture. It is faith in the 
Lord Jesus Christ, as witnessed to by all the 
Scriptures and by the spiritual experience of 
mankind, my own included. The Christ of the 
New Testament manifests, not in words only 
but also in life and action, that which still 
stands present to the apprehension of men, but 
had never before been so openly disclosed, a 
Spirit of awful elevation and authority, terrible 
in righteousness and holy zeal, separate from 
the sinful world, full of grace and truth, yet 
voluntarily united with us men, bearing our 
griefs, and in merciful kindness through infinite 
self-sacrifice bringing us salvation, taking away 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 175 

our sins and quickening us to live in the Spirit. 
If you ask whether this is Divine, the obvious 
answer is : If anything is Divine this is. It is 
the Divinest, the most certainly Divine, of all 
that it has been given unto us to know. And 
it is clearly " missing the point " altogether to 
turn from the actual presence and power of 
Divinity itself to inquire whence it came and 
how it came and who vouches for it. But it is 
revealed in a man ! Is it no wider and no 
higher than the temporal life of this man ? Did 
it kindle into being with his birth to go out 
again when he died ? It did not go out when 
he died. It is in the world to-day, a mighty 
power lifting up the souls of men and trans- 
forming them into its own likeness. Nor was 
it kindled into being when he was born. It 
had been felt throughout all the world, and its 
fuller revelation had been foretold and prepared 
for by the law and the prophets and all the 
manifold experience of mankind. It was no 
sudden, transient, meteoric flash. It was the 
disclosure of that which was, and which is, and 
which is to be. That divine and holy nature 
of which we feel the power over our own spirits 
is no other than that which was dimly felt and 



1 76 Prayer -Meeting Theology. 

sought after by the men of ancient times, and 
which was made gloriously manifest in Jesus 
Christ. It was personal in the earthly life of 
Jesus, and it used His human mind and body 
as its organs. It is personal still ; but now, 
under the Dispensation of the Spirit, it employs 
all the resources of God's creation as its instru- 
ments, even as the Lord foretold : " He shall 
receive of mine, and shall show it unto you. 
All things that the Father hath are mine: 
therefore said I, that he shall take of mine, and 
shall show it unto you." This vast multiplicity 
of instruments or organs does not affect the 
personality of the Divine Nature. The Divine 
Christ can work with " all things that the 
Father hath" as well as with hands and feet. 
In all discussion of this subject we must regard 
the essential nature of personality and not the 
accidental or actual limitations which beset it 
among men. And when we find all signs of 
personality excepting such as belong to its 
human limitations, we must hold the personality 
for proved, or drop the subject. Now, the in- 
fluence which accompanies the Gospel of Christ 
wherever it is proclaimed, and especially where 
it is believed and obeyed, is in all respects a 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 177 

personal influence of the very highest character. 
You have yourself acknowledged this. You 
said that if you could receive the statements 
of Scripture concerning the Divinity of Christ 
without reserve, you could rest well assured 
that what you now actually experience is the 
presence and work of our blessed Lord 
graciously bestowed upon you according to 
the promise in the Gospel. What you now 
enjoy you would in that case acknowledge as a 
true and worthy fulfilment of the promise. 
But the promised grace was the personal care 
and communion of our Lord. What you 
actually enjoy, then, is in itself, by your own 
admission, not distinguishable from the fellow- 
ship and assistance of a Divine person. And 
you are right. We have Jesus Christ Himself 
present with us through the Spirit. And in His 
presence all that is most personal in ourselves 
is searched, and stimulated, and supported, and 
otherwise affected, to a far greater extent than 
in our most intimate personal intercourse with 
one another. The unseen Christ is not less but 
more personal than our fellow-men. He comes 
nearer to us than father or mother or wife or 
child. He is nearer to us than our own 



1 78 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

thoughts. He meets us at the core of our 
being where our thoughts spring up. And 
through all our activities of thought and life 
He remains with us, guiding and restraining 
and encouraging and supporting us to the end. 
What meets our personal life thus vitally and 
fully must be personal, and a personality with 
such profound understanding of us and with 
such lofty authority over us must be Divine. 
All is explained in the Scriptures. Jesus Christ 
is the Son of God, the life and light of men, 
the Saviour of all and especially of them that 
believe. 

A. You seem so near to one another that I 
can see no reason why you should not come 
nearer still and arrive at a good understanding. 
One of you wants historical assurance of the 
Divinity of Christ to start with, and, that being 
found, would easily find a present experience 
corresponding thereto. The other insists on 
the present reality first, and then apparently 
finds little difficulty in going back to what 
seems fair historical assurance of the validity of 
the Gospel revelation. Since neither of you 
would have any difficulty with the present if 
certain statements of Scripture about the past 



Prayer- Meeting TJieology. i 79 

were placed entirely beyond dispute, why do 
you not take a decisive test, why not take the 
most decisive test of all, the resurrection of our 
Lord, and settle that fundamental question for 
ever? 

B. You are quite right. The resurrection is 
the true test. It is sufficiently decisive. Dis- 
believe this and you disbelieve all. But believe 
this truly and there will be no serious difficulty 
about anything else. And this is much easier 
to approach than many other questions. It is 
not, like the miraculous conception, dependent 
on a few texts and incapable of other proof. 
The resurrection of Christ was the staple of 
apostolic preaching. The very vocation of the 
apostles was to bear witness of the Lord's res- 
urrection. This was their great argument in 
support of the whole Christian faith. And it 
was a fair argument. It is a fair argument still. 
It challenged examination then. It challenges 
examination now. If the Gospel of the Resur- 
rection be true, it ought to be capable of 
demonstration. If false, it ought to bear unmis- 
takable marks of falsehood about it. The Res- 
urrection is in every respect the critical and 
decisive point. Yet, alas ! right here is my 



180 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

difficulty of difficulties, before which I am cast 
about like a wave of the sea driven with the 
wind and tossed. I never can deny or wholly 
disbelieve the resurrection of Christ. The cool 
assurance of those who declare to the world 
that He is sleeping His eternal sleep under the 
Syrian stars is to me revolting beyond all en- 
durance. And yet I am afraid that I can never 
fully and firmly believe that He is risen. 

A. Such wavering is imbecile ; and you ought 
to put an end to it promptly. You certainly 
need heroic treatment ; and there is no one to 
administer it but yourself; and this is the place 
and this the ripe moment to do it. You 
must make up your mind, and you must keep 
it made up. The evidence of the resurrection 
of Christ is much stronger than the evidence 
on which we believe half of what we do believe 
most firmly about remote ages. And there is 
nothing offered in disproof excepting the mirac- 
ulous character of the event supposed ; and to 
accept that as disproof is clearly a miserable 
begging of the whole question. 

B. The evidence is strong I admit. Taken 
by itself, it is overpowering. In childhood, when 
it came to me by itself, it satisfied me entirely. 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 181 

It seemed to me then utterly unreasonable and 
even wicked for anyone to fail to be convinced 
by it. But since I have been led to consider 
more particularly the stupendous character of 
the miracle, and the common credulity of 
ancient times, and the innumerable marvels 
then received without question ; since I have 
become aware of the great uncertainty with 
regard to the matter which is avowed by many 
professing Christians, and of the still greater 
uncertainty which betrays itself in the lives of 
many more, wherein the power of the resurrec- 
tion seems entirely lacking ; since I have be- 
come accustomed to see the doctrine emphati- 
cally rejected by men who know the record as 
well as we do and better, and who appear to 
be men of serious and pious minds, I also have 
lost my simple unquestioning faith in this car- 
dinal doctrine of the Gospel, and I know not 
what to say or think about it. Sometimes I 
am inclined to cry out, " Lord, I believe ; help 
my unbelief." At other times I dare not say 
even that. I will say to you here what I 
never thought of mentioning to any one. I 
have not got over my youthful feeling that it is 
wicked to doubt a truth so great, so blessed 



1 82 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

and so well attested. For such doubt I have 
done harder penance in soul-crushing dreams 
than St. Jerome ever did for being a Cicero- 
nian, or John Bunyan for a ruder profanity. 
Their sins might be wiped away, as they had 
not denied the living Saviour. But I had 
doubted and discredited the great charter of 
the hope of mankind ; and my penance was not 
for correction, but for the vengeance of heaven 
and earth and for my utter ruin. You may 
smile at my simplicity, but you may well be- 
lieve that I have tried the heroic treatment. I 
have said, like yourself, " I will believe ! I will 
doubt no more ! " But I have felt afterwards 
that my wilful faith was impious and degrading ; 
that I sought to hold Christian doctrine not 
because I was convinced of its truth, but be- 
cause I wished it true and feared to doubt. 
Then I was ashamed of my insincerity, and I 
resolved to seek the simple truth at all hazards. 
But when I addressed myself to the inquiry, I 
never made any progress. The evidence for 
the faith seemed immense. But the difficulties 
were immense also. And I was paralyzed be- 
tween them till I took alarm again and bestirred 
myself to begin the fruitless round once more. 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 183 

C. All that only convinces me the more that, 
for us whose lot is cast in the present time, it 
is presumptuous and dangerous to reverse the 
order of Providence and lean over to find our 
life in the remote past. Do not imagine that 
I am disposed to deny the resurrection of our 
Lord, or to discredit its historical evidence. I 
believe in the resurrection, and I think that 
the historical evidence of it has never been 
shaken. Still, I do not believe in the resurrec- 
tion because of the historical evidence. That 
evidence, irrefragable as it is, would fail to con- 
vince me in the face of an unbelieving world 
and a wavering church and the motions of un- 
belief in my own evil heart, if there had not 
been that in my personal experience and in the 
history of the modern world which cannot be 
denied or doubted, and which welcomes the 
fact of the resurrection as its proper antecedent 
and explanation. 

B. You ought to have been with Israel in 
Egypt to show them how to make bricks with- 
out any straw and perhaps without any mate- 
rials at all. The evidence of the resurrection 
would fail to convince you, but you can believe 
without the evidence ! They that be saved 



184 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

must be few indeed if such subtlety be a con- 
dition of Christian faith. Strait was the gate 
from the beginning ; but now it is entirely 
closed against plain people and hardly open to 
the preternaturally acute. 

C. On the other hand, I have nothing to do 
with subtlety or acuteness. From the assur- 
ance of Christ's personal presence in the world 
to-day, which is a matter of experience, it is easy 
to go back to the fact of the resurrection, 
whether we know much or little of the evidence 
in support of the historical character of the 
Gospels which report the fact to us. But it 
would take great learning and astuteness to ex- 
amine and weigh the whole of that evidence and 
to regulate our belief in strict accordance with 
it. We might as well try to " drink up the 
sea " for our refreshment. 

A. We are not qualified, it is true, to deal 
with such evidence as lies buried in dusty old 
libraries and in dead languages. But in our 
pulpits and seminaries we have plenty of ac- 
complished scholars who know all about that, 
and who assure us that it is all right. 

C. And there are plenty of other scholars 
quite as thorough who profess to have weighed 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 185 

the same evidence and to have found it want- 
ing. Why should we trust one school rather 
than another if the great question really de- 
pends on out-of-the-way evidence ? I am satis- 
fied myself to abide by the plain statements of 
the English New Testament. I accept the 
Gospel story of the resurrection of Christ, be- 
cause I believe in the living Lord, and am 
therefore sure that, even if this particular ac- 
count in the New Testament were not entirely 
true, still something like this, not a whit less 
marvellous and glorious, must be true. 

B. Scripture has little weight with you, or I 
might at least appeal to the example of the 
apostles against this substitution of your own 
experience, as you call it, for the great external 
fact, on the truth and acceptance of which all 
Christian experience, properly so called, must 
depend. The apostles regarded the fact of the 
resurrection of the Lord as a matter so funda- 
mental that without it all preaching and all be- 
lieving would be vain. They were called to be 
witnesses of the resurrection ; and they never 
swerved from the declaration of the historical 
fact to proclaim, as a substitute, some inward 
ups and downs of their own. 



1 86 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

C. Now at last I trust we shall understand 
one another. You appeal to the example of 
the apostles. To the example of the apostles 
above all would I appeal also. They believed 
that Christ was risen from the dead. They 
regarded His resurrection as an essential and 
principal part of the Christian faith ; and they 
fulfilled their ministry as witnesses of its truth. 
But our controversy is not as to the fact of the 
resurrection, or as to the importance of believ- 
ing it, but as to the true ground on which the 
belief must rest. On what grounds, then, did 
the apostles believe that the Lord was risen ? 
Did they believe on historical evidence ? The 
very best historical evidence they summarily 
rejected. It is notorious that Thomas dis- 
dained to believe on the testimony of his 
fellow-apostles, though no testimony could be 
better. It is equally true that to the other 
apostles the words of the faithful women, who 
were the earliest witnesses, were as idle tales. 
The eleven believed in the resurrection when 
the risen Lord showed Himself unto them, not 
before. And all the witnessing of the eleven and 
of them that were with them was utterly lost on 
one who was to be not a whit behind the very 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 187 

chiefest apostles. Saul of Tarsus never be- 
lieved until the Lord Himself appeared unto 
him on the way to Damascus. None of the 
apostles really believed on the testimony of 
other apostles, or on any historical evidence 
whatsoever. They believed because the Lord 
showed Himself alive unto them after His pas- 
sion. If the apostles could not believe on his- 
torical evidence when it was direct and simple 
and as strong as such evidence can ever be, 
how can it satisfy simple souls nowadays when 
it is remote and broken and complicated in the 
highest degree ? Happily we are not left to 
depend on it alone. Though born, as it might 
seem, out of due time for so high a privilege, 
we may yet know our blessed Lord directly, 
and ground our belief in His resurrection on 
actual communion with Him through the 
Spirit. And that this is really what takes place 
in every Christian life any one may see by ex- 
amining the confessions and prayers and hymns 
of the saints in all ages. Or if these be deemed 
too formal and perfunctory to prove the point, 
we may see the proof of it, where there is no 
room for formality, in the words of Christian 
people when their flesh and their heart fail, 



1 88 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

and the world grows dim, and Jesus Christ is 
still with them, their strength and joy in the 
hour of dissolution. Only the other day, as 
the papers reported, Dr. Howard Crosby, with 
his dying hand, wrote the message to his chil- 
dren : " My heart is resting sweetly with Jesus, 
and my hand is in His." I will add that this 
is what any one might expect who reads the 
Gospels. Christ promised not only that He 
would rise from the dead the third day, but 
also that He would not leave His people com- 
fortless, but would come unto them and abide 
with them for ever. We can easily believe that 
He is risen when we have felt the glorious 
power and grace of His presence. But if the 
promise of His continual presence is broken, 
what documents, what monuments, what histo- 
ries, what testimonies, are going to prove unto 
us that He is risen, — risen to break His word, 
and to disappoint the hopes of them that 
looked to Him for salvation ? 

B. Your vehemence carries you away, and 
makes you inaccurate even in your Scripture 
history. Some of the apostles did believe in 
the resurrection of their Lord on the testimony 
of an honored fellow-apostle ; otherwise, what 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 189 

means the saying, " The Lord is risen indeed 
and hath appeared unto Simon"? And one 
apostle, we are expressly told, believed on ob- 
serving the order of the deserted sepulchre. 
Besides, as you have just said, the apostles were 
called to be witnesses of the resurrection among 
the nations. But what need could there be of 
witnesses, or of what use could it be to send 
forth witnesses, if belief in the resurrection 
could rest on nothing less than the actual pres- 
ence and manifestation of the Lord Himself? 
And what can be the use of all the Christian 
testifying and teaching in the modern world if 
never a soul can believe on the testimony of 
others? Your theories seem to nullify not only 
Christian history but all intelligible Christian 
life and work, leaving only a certain mystical 
ecstasy, which a few may experience, but which 
is far too ethereal for ordinary human nature's 
daily food. I should like to be able to attain 
the degree of certainty which you enjoy. But 
I should dread rather than covet your kind of 
certainty. What I need and desire, though 
I am as far as ever from securing it, is a 
firm possession of the faith which " cometh 
by hearing." I am afraid of the faith which 



190 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

cometh by brooding and dreaming and com- 
promising. 

C. I am prepared to renounce uncondition- 
ally every theory which nullifies Christian his- 
tory and Christian fellowship and the means of 
grace. But 1 wish I could make it clear to you 
that I have no such theory to renounce. Some- 
thing was said here about incipient belief and 
mature belief, the faith of the child and the 
faith of the grown-up man. That distinction 
perhaps will suggest the explanation of our dif- 
ferences and the way to a complete understand- 
ing between us. In your childhood you were 
more than satisfied with the evidence of the 
resurrection. When childhood was passed you 
wavered and hesitated in full view of the very 
same evidence. The child believed on obvious 
grounds. The man could not retain his belief 
without new and deeper grounds. "The Lord 
is risen indeed and hath appeared unto Simon," 
said the apostles, eager excited novices as yet in 
the great and glorious faith. How long would 
they have continued to believe if their faith 
had been left to subsist on the testimony of 
Simon ? How long, and to what purpose, would 
"that other disciple" have believed if his faith 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 191 

had nothing to feed on but what he saw in the 
holy sepulchre? I think I am justified in say- 
ing that not one of the apostles could have 
believed permanently on the testimony of 
others or on any historical evidence whatsoever, 
and that their real, abiding, effective belief in 
the resurrection, though prepared for by testi- 
mony, rested on their actual communion with 
the risen Lord. As to the ministry of the 
apostles, faith came " by hearing " wherever 
they proclaimed the glad tidings. But a stable, 
fruitful, victorious faith never came merely by 
hearing even apostolic preaching. The Spirit 
from on high was given to those who received 
the word, and the work begun by the apostles 
was perfected by the indwelling Christ. And 
so it is with all Christian preaching and teach- 
ing, whether by the apostles, or by the woman 
of Samaria, or by the faithful workers of our 
own time. People will be impressed by a seri- 
ous and faithful ministry. They will believe 
the earnest words of holy men and women 
whose lives attest their message. But if their 
faith is to abide and bear fruit, they must, as 
time goes on, learn to believe, not because of 
the word of man or woman, but because they 



192 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

have themselves known Him that liveth and 
was dead, the Son of God, the Saviour of the 
world. This is the ultimate ground of faith. 
All faith is insecure until it rests here. The 
authority of believing parents and friends, and 
the authority of Christendom with its great his- 
tory and its saints and martyrs, are legitimate 
and impressive ; but they will only sustain 
a provisional faith. In the last resort, to the 
awakened, earnest, maturing soul, no authority 
is sufficient save the voice of the Good Shep- 
herd Himself. And, my dear brother, you have 
heard that voice long ago, heard it and followed 
Him. You have the communion with Him 
which is the ultimate ground of faith. You 
have the true faith itself, we all know. The 
inordinate craving which disturbs your peace 
is intellectual, not spiritual. You walk by faith 
day by day. You would fain walk the same 
path by sight also. You would have faith and 
sight go hand in hand to the divine presence. 
You know God in Christ according to the Spirit. 
You would also know Him according to the 
flesh. But it cannot be. 

C would have said more, but the warnings 
of approaching revolution which had for some 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 193 

time been heard at intervals were now justified. 
A tumult of voices and hurrying footsteps was 
heard on the stairs, and three or four of the 
smaller children broke into the room, and, 
frightened at their own boldness, scarcely 
plucked up courage enough to fulfil their mis- 
sion and announce that dinner was all ready. 
" There," said A, " I suppose you are sorry. 
The dinner-horn is not unwelcome when heard 
out in the corn-fields. But here it sounds an 
inglorious retreat before the battle is lost or 
won." " No, we need not be sorry," replied C ; 
" I think these interruptions are as much for 
our good in our speculations as in our other 
labors. They find stopping-places for us when 
we cannot find them ourselves. And often 
when we have ceased our searching, we find, 
as by a gracious inspiration, the solution of 
difficulties which had baffled all our toil." 
" k What a pity then," retorted A, " that they 
did not blow the horn two or three hours 
sooner!" " No," answered C, as he picked 
up one of the chubby heralds and led his 
friends down-stairs, " a pause after you have 
done nothing and attempted nothing is a 
continuation of nothing. But an enforced 
pause after you have done your best is 



194 Prayer-Meeting Theology. 

often God's chosen opportunity to help. So 
He giveth His beloved sleep, and, in their 
sleep, riches, which, awake, they could in no 
way compass. 



III. 



At the foot of the stairs the theologians were 
met by the main body of the holiday-makers, 
and young and old marched in some disorder 
to the table, which seemed so unfamiliar in 
position and general appearance that C needed 
a pilot in his own house. When all had found 
their places, the novelty of the situation and 
the difficulty of serving so many together with- 
out the aid of trained waiters went far toward 
supplying the place of any sustained conversa- 
tion. The younger children, however, were 
unwilling that so great an occasion should pass 
without the dignity of common discourse, and 
they made several brave attempts to introduce 
attractive topics. Their efforts, and their haps 
and mishaps, were not undeserving of a chroni- 
cler ; but they would lead us too far from our 
present purpose. When they were almost 
ready to leave the table, a child of the house 
ventured to ask : " Where were you, and Mr. 

195 



196 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

A and Mr. B, all the morning, Papa?" "We 
stayed in the house to have a good talk 
together," was the answer. " Was it a very 
good talk ? " murmured the little questioner, 
evidently trying to master the precise force of 
the adjective. " And may I be so bold," said 
one of the ladies, " as to ask what this very 
good talk was all about ? " The men looked 
at one another in dumb consultation as to the 
proper answer ; but the answer was not forth- 
coming. The ladies laughed, and one of them 
remarked : " A solid half-day of talk, and noth- 
ing to tell ! Something beyond our compre- 
hension, I have no doubt. But would it not 
be well to educate us and fit us for high 
communings with our husbands?" The men, 
however, were not to be enticed to retail their 
morning talk. They rose from the table, and 
walked with little ceremony out-of-doors, osten- 
sibly to examine the appointments of the yards 
and barns and to exchange thoughts on sundry 
points of good husbandry. But they were in 
no mood for such work, and B broke out : 
" Let us not be entangled with the affairs of 
this life to-day. Farming will have us body 
and soul to-morrow. But now we are doctors 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 197 

and bishops of the Church hesitant. Where 
did we leave our theology?" The council 
being thus abruptly called to order, the con- 
versation took something like the following 
form, the speakers standing at first and then 
one by one assuming such postures of greater 
ease as the place allowed. 

A. If you have any more debating to do, you 
must do it quickly. And it seems to me that 
you have much more to do now than you 
had when you began. You might then well 
enough have left things alone. But now that 
you have torn in pieces the whole body of di- 
vinity and scattered its parts all about in such 
a sad litter, you ought to gather the dishonored 
limbs together and lay them out in some decent 
order before you leave them. 

C. I took a larger part than my proper share 
in the conversation of this morning ; and I sup- 
pose I am mainly responsible for the " litter " 
you speak of. I hardly feel equal to the task of 
restoring order just now. It will, in fact, take 
years of devout living as well as thinking to get 
all the factors of our religious system into their 
proper places and uses. But just to gather the 
" litter " into one little heap, I should like to 



198 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

refer once more to the main point for which I 
have wished to contend. What I have desired 
to emphasize is, that our faith does not depend, 
either for its inception or for its full confirma- 
tion, on difficult logical processes or on remote 
historical investigations, though such processes 
are quite legitimate and even necessary in the 
fully developed intellectual life of man ; that, 
simply as Christians, we have no need to launch 
on the treacherous sea of critical and historical 
controversy, but may witness its storms and its 
shipwrecks from the safe shore ; that illiterate 
people and young children may know enough to 
believe in Christ with good reason, and that 
when they do believe in Him their faith is met 
by the spiritual realities which it recognized afar 
off, and is thereby lifted out of the region of 
controversy and placed on a rock, on which it 
thenceforth rests securely, whatsoever winds of 
doctrine blow around it. 

B. You are anxious to distinguish between 
faith and knowledge because you perceive that 
knowledge will fail you. You wish to provide 
that when knowledge does utterly fail, and 
when, one would suppose, ignorance or uncer- 
tainty must follow, then you may spurn the 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 199 

vulgar earth and rest in the certainty of faith, 
that is, in certainty without knowledge, a kind 
of certainty very hard to distinguish from wilful 
assumption or superstition. As Christians, you 
say, we may, from a place of safety, view the 
tempest passing by and the wrecks strewing 
the shore. But as men we cannot keep from 
the path of the tempest. Its elements are the 
forces of our own nature. Its victims are our 
fellow-men. And, whether as x men or as Chris- 
tians, we ought surely to desire a haven into 
which we can pilot the fleet, not a proud rock 
from which we may witness its dispersion and 
ruin. On such a rock you and I have long 
stood, but not in perfect peace. I should be 
content if I could but tell rationally how I 
found the lofty asylum, and how my brethren 
may reach it. But I can point to no steps 
and to no landing. The rock frowns upon the 
perishing wretches steep and inhospitable. We 
found footing upon it in a dream, we know not 
how. In other words, whatever personal assur- 
ance with regard to religious truth you and I 
may at times have possessed or may possess 
now, we cannot satisfactorily connect it with 
verifiable facts, and therefore we cannot com- 



200 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

municate or justify it to any one. How then 
can we really justify it to ourselves, or be truly 
satisfied with it ? How shall we meet the 
charge that our faith is a violent assumption ? 
C. I have no objection to say that our faith, 
in its earlier stages, is an assumption. It is an 
assumption, not wilful or violent, but earnest, 
deliberate, reverent, and dutiful. It is an as- 
sumption which we have the best reasons for 
making. And I believe you may yet show 
unto others the landing and the steps which 
led you to it long ago. In childhood you 
were satisfied with the evidence offered to you 
in favor of the Christian faith. Now, what was 
that evidence which satisfied you ? Mainly it 
was the character of the faith itself ; and its 
adaptation to the need and craving of your 
soul ; and the natural and moral authority of 
those who delivered this faith unto you as their 
own most precious possession, valued increas- 
ingly with increasing trial, the life of their life. 
Authority is theoretically under a cloud in our 
time. But practically it is as real and power- 
ful as ever. It has been said, I think, by the 
accomplished author of The Influence of Author- 
ity in Matters of Opinion, that " one of the main 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 201 

elements of civilization is well-placed confi- 
dence." And if civilization endures and ad- 
vancesthrough confidence in worthy authorities 
even more than through independent inquiry, 
so certainly does the Christian faith also. You 
and I believed the Gospel in the first instance, 
not on scientific demonstration of its truth, but 
on the authority, the legitimate spiritual au- 
thority, of Christian people, who testified in 
word and in deed that they had experienced its 
power and proved its truth. When we have thus 
believed on the testimony of the witnessing 
Church, and when we have been confirmed in 
the faith by our own experience of the Chris- 
tian life, we are not without the means to lead 
others to the truth so far as men may be said 
to lead one another to the truth of God. We 
have no reason to distrust or to depart from 
the procedure by which the Church reached us. 
We must bear witness to the truth with the 
whole Church of God : and our testimony, 
being supported by our lives, will help to do 
for others what the faithful testimony of our 
elders did for us. The truth is maintained and 
propagated in the world by personal, not by 
merely logical, testimony. And in the end, 



202 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

strictly speaking, the truth is not made effective 
by us at all, but by the Holy Spirit acting 
through us and with us : and He can act 
through our concrete personal life as well as 
through our abstract reasonings and formal 
conclusions. 

B. One might take you for a good Catholic 
from the unction with which you speak of au- 
thority and the Church. The Church indeed ! 
Where is your Church, my dear man? We 
have churches enough and to spare, it is true. 
But churches are not a Church. Or if we have 
a Church, it is a Church of our own making, and 
a Church which with the least provocation we 
will pull down and make over again to suit our 
altered taste. We make the creed, we make 
the ritual, we make the discipline, we make the 
minister, we make everything, inside and out. 
The whole Church is the work of our own 
hands. And what authority, pray, can such a 
Church have for us or for anybody ? We are 
ourselves before it and above it. I can under- 
stand a Catholic's appeal to the authority of 
his Church. But we have fled for our life from 
Rome, and from every Church making any 
serious pretensions to authority, as from Anti- 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 203 

christ. You dare not look back that way. 
Remember Lot's wife ! 

C. Lot's wife looked back towards Sodom, 
not towards a great and honored Christian 
Church. We have fled from Rome, it is true ; 
and the flight was doubtless necessary. Per- 
haps it was even necessary to flee, as we did, 
with precipitation, like the man on the house- 
top who durst not enter his own house to carry 
anything away with him. Still, we ought to 
remember, the fire of God did not consume the 
house which we forsook ; nor was the house 
even left desolate. The Protestant Reforma- 
tion was Providential, of course. But so also 
was the preservation of the Catholic Church 
throughout a great part of Europe. Puri- 
tanism and Nonconformity in England have 
been abundantly justified. But the Anglican 
Church also is justified none the less. While 
we need not lament our flight from Rome, or 
from the Church of England, we may with ad- 
vantage in these peaceful times go back and 
look at the old homes of our forefathers, and 
recover some of the treasures which we aban- 
doned in the great panic, bestowing also, if it 
be possible, some good gift out of the abun- 



204 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

dance of our new homes. And if some of our 
friends are smitten with the love of the older 
homes, and desire to end their days within 
their sacred precincts, God bless them, and give 
them the faith and the graces of their saintliest 
fore-fathers! I never could mourn over Non- 
conformists in England and Wales who hon- 
estly change their minds and conform with 
the old Church. Nor have I a syllable of re- 
gret or blame for the distinguished Anglicans 
who went all the way to Rome, and went to 
stay. I am glad that they went, and proved 
that the way is still open and safe for the chil- 
dren of God from one communion to the other, 
and that souls nurtured on Thomas Scott's 
theology and Milner's Church History could 
still find the bread of life in the Roman Church. 
There is a longing in all sects, from Rome 
downward, for greater union among Christians. 
The passing of individuals to and fro from one 
communion to another will help to tear 
down the fences. And the wistful climbing of 
the fences on the inside, by uncanonical ex- 
change of pulpits and unlicensed liberty of 
prophesying and other irregularities of daily 
occurrence, will not strengthen them. This 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 205 

longing for a visible union between all Chris- 
tians, and this groping for it so common on all 
sides, whether they will ever bring forth any 
good fruit or not, at least plainly betoken, 
what is to my mind an established fact, that, 
below the surface, the churches are a Church 
after all, divided in opinions and methods, but 
one in aim and faith, and therefore one in 
influence and authority on behalf of the Gos- 
pel. The fact which you have in your mind 
when you say that we make our churches at 
our pleasure only comes to this : that we rec- 
ognize the authority of the Church with some 
personal freedom ; that the truth handed down 
unto us in substance takes definite form in our 
minds according to our respective capacities ; 
that we get a personal hold of the truth and 
reproduce it in vital relations to our own life 
and thought, instead of repeating it in fixed 
forms and phrases like parrots. Authority with 
us is as real and as great as in the Roman 
Catholic Church, perhaps even greater because 
more inward and spiritual. 

B. You are surely thinking, not of the au- 
thority of the Church, but of the authority of 
what, for the time being, commends itself to 



206 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

our individual minds as truth — that is, of the 
authority of our own shifting opinions. This 
is the authority to which we all bow in the end. 
And it is this that breaks up the old Churches 
and the new, and, by discrediting Church after 
Church founded in love and good faith, makes 
the very idea of a Church among us almost a 
mockery. If the Churches could agree in their 
teachings, their authority would be of weight 
and of use. But, disagreeing as they do always 
and everywhere, if they have any authority at 
all it can only be authority to cancel one 
another's influence, and to throw every man 
back on the precarious guidance of his own 
private judgment. 

C. We cannot desire any authority to keep 
us in perpetual childhood, or to make our 
faith for ever rest on the wisdom of men and 
not on the power of God. But we certainly 
have in the Christian Church, divided though 
it be, an effective authority reaching far beyond 
our own reasonings and sufficing for our needs. 
We make far too much of the so-called divi- 
sions of the Christian Church. They are mere 
lines on the surface, not clefts in the body. 
The Church of Rome still has authority for 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 207 

Protestants. Her saints and her theologians, 
when they bear witness of Christ, are ours as 
well as hers. Cardinal Newman says with great 
tenderness and beauty that, while yet in the 
Anglican Church, he seemed to himself an out- 
cast when he took down from the shelves of 
his library the volumes of St. Athanasius or 
St. Basil, and set himself to study them ; but 
that, on the contrary, when at length he was 
brought into Catholic communion, he kissed 
them with delight, with a feeling that in them 
he had more than all that he had lost ; and, as 
though directly addressing the glorious saints 
who bequeathed them to the Church, he said 
to the inanimate pages: " You are now mine, 
and I am now yours, beyond any mistake." 
We may well herein be bolder than Newman, 
and say that the great Fathers were his before, 
beyond any mistake, and that they are ours 
also. And we may claim not only the Fathers 
of the early undivided Church but even the 
very latest saints and doctors of the Church of 
Rome, and Newman himself among them. He 
is an excellent example of the insignificance of 
the " divisions " in the Church of Christ, re- 
minding us that frequently they are not only 



208 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

lines on the surface but imaginary lines at 
that. There was doubtless a Providential pur- 
pose served in his conversion to Rome. His 
Letters and Correspondence show that it was the 
proper ending of the captivating poem of his 
earlier life. But, for all that, in the true Cath- 
olic Church, the fact and the date of his conver- 
sion to Rome may be safely forgotten. The 
other conversion, his conversion to God at the 
age of fifteen, of which all through his life he 
was more certain than that he had hands and 
feet, brought him into the true Church in which 
he lived and died. The Parochial Sermons of 
the Anglican, and the Discourses to Mixed 
Congregations of the Roman Catholic, are 
alike the utterances of a sincere and earnest 
disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, and alike 
they swell the mighty voice of the Christian 
Church testifying of her Lord. The various 
divisions of the Church have much to distin- 
guish them from one another if we regard 
matters of secondary importance ; but on the 
great articles of the common faith they speak 
with marvellous unanimity. We still have 
One Church, and really but one. 

B. The Invisible Church, I suppose, which 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 209 

is also inaudible, and plainly of no account 
upon earth. 

C. The Church has an invisible side, its 
heavenward side. Its life is hidden. Its citi- 
zenship is in heaven. And the various sections 
of the Church are invisibly united by their 
common inward faith and love toward God 
and by the presence of Christ through the 
Spirit with them all alike. But the Church 
which is invisible on its heavenward side may 
still be visible on earth ; and though its unity 
rests on and consists in what is invisible, yet 
that unity may be manifested not only by 
political or quasi-political articulation but by 
the fruits of the One Spirit, by Christian pro- 
fession and worship, and by the observance of 
Christian ordinances. The Church of Rome 
calls itself visible ; so does the Church of Eng- 
land. How can that Church be invisible which 
includes these conspicuous bodies and many 
more ? 

B. Then all who profess and call themselves 

Christians are to be counted in the One Church 
whose witness is of such authority in the mat- 
ter of faith? 

C. Most assuredly, though we do not pre- 



210 Prayer -Meeting Theology, 

sume to judge the hearts or to vouch for the sin- 
cerity of any. We call a wheat field a wheat 
field without stopping to count the tares ; and 
we may call a Church a Church without stopping 
to weed out the hypocrites. 

B. But a house divided against itself cannot 
stand. What if some of these bodies which 
profess and call themselves Christians should 
uphold and teach doctrines which are at war 
with Christianity and subversive of all religion? 
What then would become of their authority? 
Would it be for or against the Gospel? 

C. Why should you borrow needless trouble ? 
Of answering hypothetical questions and pro- 
viding for remote contingencies there is no end. 
When people cease to believe in Jesus Christ 
they will in due time cease to profess belief in 
Him. 

B. But in the meantime, before they cease to 
profess faith in Him, are they authorities for 
the truth of the Gospel, making up One Church 
with us though they distinctly contradict what 
is to us the very essence of the Christian faith? 
My question is not merely hypothetical. The 
case stated is not a contingency at all, but a 
standing and familiar matter of fact. Take, for 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 211 

instance, the Unitarians. I mention them with 
no lack of love or courtesy, you must well know. 
I have been drawn too much into their way of 
thinking to have any right or inclination to 
speak harshly of them. And the honored names 
on their roll, and their wide and generous cul- 
ture, and their many works of piety and love, 
make it impossible for any one to speak harshly 
of them. Yet I must say that, though they pro- 
fess themselves Christians and though their lives 
often would adorn any profession, their teach- 
ing, as it seems to me, denies the Christian faith 
utterly. And so it seems to all Catholic and 
all Evangelical Christendom. And so it seems 
also to those who openly reject Christianity. 
With Unitarianism they have no serious quarrel. 
When Jesus is regarded as merely a man, then 
is the offence of the cross ceased. In regard to 
the Unitarians, then, for example, which is the 
more serious fact, and which carries the greater 
authority, their sentimental adherence to the 
Christian name or their emphatic rejection of 
the fundamental article of the Christian faith? 
C. I should say that their faith is more 
weighty than their opinions ; and that their 
earnest profession of the faith which their opin- 



212 Prayer-Meeting Theology, 

ions seem to deny is a distinct confirmation of 
the faith of the orthodox Churches. If none 
believed in Christ but those who fully accept 
the Nicene creed, there might be some ground 
for saying that Christianity is a religion for 
minds of a single type and habit. But when 
powerful and cultured bodies which reject our 
formula still trust and love ourLordand Saviour, 
they certainly add to the volume of Church 
authority in favor of the Gospel. 

B. I should rejoice in so large and respect- 
able an addition if it did not involve fearful de- 
traction also. They profess faith in our Lord, 
it is true. But they first seek to divest Him of 
that for which alone we deem Him worthy of 
the worship and confidence of mankind. How 
then can we attach any weight to their faith 
without repudiating our own? 

C. We need not identify the Christian faith 
absolutely with our own interpretation of it. 
Our precise view of Christian doctrine is surely 
not infallible or essential. The apostles were 
long without it if they ever came to it at all. It 
took Christian scholars many ages to formulate 
the doctrine of the Person of Christ as we are 
supposed to hold it. The mass of orthodox 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 213 

Christians throughout the world cannot even 
now be supposed to hold it with any great clear- 
ness or firmness. Our own wives and children 
have but the slightest hold upon it, being ready 
to confess it in words without ever confronting 
the full difficulty of the sense or of the proof. 
But we trust they have the one thing needful, 
because they have personal affection, submis- 
sion, devotion, to the Saviour, personal trust in 
Him, and the all-embracing gift of His Spirit. 
And it is certain that those who receive Christ 
as little children, and receive grace and spiritual 
power through Him, bear witness of Him in 
His Church as effectively as the acutest and 
most correct theologians. The witness of the 
Church is in the main the witness of humble 
souls who have never fathomed the Arian con- 
troversy but who have known the love of Christ. 
B. Those who have never raised the great 
question, and who fall short of full belief by 
defect of thought, do not contradict our faith, 
and may reasonably be supposed to be at heart 
in sympathy with it and ready to receive it in 
its strictest form when it can in such form be 
properly presented and brought home to them. 
But those who have squarely faced the ques- 



214 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

tion of the Divinity of Christ, and have dis- 
tinctly decided it against the teaching of the 
Catholic creeds, do deny and reject what to us 
is the very essence of the Christian faith. 

C. Yet, supposing them to have the same 
personal affection, submission, devotion, to the 
Saviour, and the same personal trust in Him, 
which the mass of unspeculative Christians 
have, they differ from that mass only in having 
greater mental activity directed to religious 
questions ; and they differ from pious orthodox 
thinkers only in having to think without the 
endowment, or the bias, or the training, or the 
environment, or whatever else it is, that insures 
orthodox conclusions. If men will think at all, 
they must think as they are able with all the 
limitations of their native powers and of their 
education. If we think, we must run the risk 
of falling into error. Will you say that those 
who do not think about religious questions 
may be good Christians, but that those who do 
think may find it impossible to be Christians 
at all ? 

B. The question is not as to the possibility of 
being Christians. We are no judges in that 
matter. Unitarians may be Christians if Christ 



Prayer -Meeting Theology. 215 

will accept them. Our question is whether the 
weight of their authority among men is cast on 
the side of the Christian faith. 

C. To that I have already answered that in 
as far as they confess their faith in Christ and 
live by that faith, in as far as they practically 
commend the Lord Jesus Christ to the love and 
obedience and confidence of their fellow-men, 
their authority is as clearly on the side of the 
Gospel and as effectual in its behalf as that of 
other Christians. 

B. But how can they commend the Lord 
Jesus Christ to the love and obedience and 
confidence of their fellow-men ? They cannot 
commit themselves even so far as to call Him 
" Lord and Master." Their differentia among 
professing Christians is " to have no differentia " 
excepting this, that they honor Christ, not as 
they honor the Father, but as they honor Moses 
and Plato and Paul and Goethe and Abraham 
Lincoln. Christ needs no Church to commend 
Him to the confidence of mankind in this mod- 
erate degree. And a Church which makes it its 
business so to commend Him is more likely to 
obscure than to increase the glory of His Name, 
more likely to cause His followers to stumble 



2 1 6 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

and go astray than to bring strangers under 
His yoke. Cultivated and charitable, and even 
religious, as the Unitarians undoubtedly are, to 
recognize them as Christians witnessing for the 
true faith is to commend to our children and to 
all the world as Christianity what to ourselves 
is a denial of the Lord who bought us. 

C. You are unjust to your friends after all. 
Unitarians who profess themselves Christians 
do not class the man Christ Jesus with other 
great men. To them, as to the rest of us, He 
stands alone as the spiritual Head of the race. 
Nor do they withhold from Him any honor 
which they can consider real. They reverence 
Him if they have missed the true doctrine 
of His person. And if they do not give Him 
all His rightful titles, it is from misunder- 
standing and from no churlishness. They do 
Him greater honor than any title can confer 
in seeking under His guidance to do the will 
of the Father which sent Him. Our children 
are pretty well drilled in the orthodox dogmas, 
but they clearly lack something yet. Who 
knows but they need lessons in the actual 
service of Christ from the practical Unitarians? 
And, besides, if you could protect your chil- 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 217 

dren against them by a mere anathema, they 
could in like manner protect their own chil- 
dren against you. To guard your children from 
the risk of imbibing incorrect opinions, would 
you renounce the right to aid other children in 
gaining the full truth ? . Would you shut all 
children up for ever in close confinement with 
the opinions of their parents, whatever those 
may be ? No, let the conflicting opinions have 
a fair field. Fortify your children with the 
truth, and welcome all who love Christ into full 
communion, that, if so be, you may have the 
blessed privilege of teaching some of them the 
way of God more perfectly. But, in fact, you 
cannot protect right thinking within your own 
household otherwise than by the clear and ener- 
getic manifestation of the truth in doctrine and 
in life. Error has full scope in society, in litera- 
ture, in all the world. Suppress it in the Church, 
silence it in the home ; you will still meet it in 
the street, in the reading-room, and in the homes 
of your friends. Nay, without any suggestion 
from without, the errors which we condemn and 
lament in others rise like apparitions in our 
own minds. They follow our truer thoughts 
as if they were their shadows. It sometimes 



2 1 8 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

seems to me that all the heresies are little more 
than the hardening of thoughts which lurk 
within us all into definite, abiding, and aggres- 
sive forms. 

B. That does not justify the heretics or en- 
courage us to consort with them. If we must 
encounter doubt and misbelief in the privacy 
of our own thoughts, we should simply be re- 
inforcing the enemy against ourselves by asso- 
ciating freely as Christian brethren with those 
in whom the lurking misbelief has triumphed 
openly. 

C. Yet it is hard to condemn those whose 
only fault is that they are to a greater degree 
than ourselves the victims of tendencies from 
which none of us are free. To welcome them 
into full Christian fellowship would not be 
reinforcing the enemy against ourselves, but 
reinforcing the truth in the magainst the en- 
emy. I do not believe that we can ever in 
this life get rid of the thoughts and misgivings 
which in their isolated and hardened forms 
are called heresies. I believe they are even 
factors in the proper life and thought of 
the Church in this immature world. True 
doctrines are not adequately grasped until 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 219 

they have been opposed. Neither is the truth 
which has been reached maintained in all its 
fulness and life without the stimulus of the 
opposite thought. A too rigid orthodoxy in 
the long run becomes dry and barren. It 
paralyzes thought and life. Then the rise of 
a great heresy is felt to be a blessing, and the 
steadiest and devoutest Christians glorify God 
for it and embrace it with joy. Be hospitable 
and brotherly to heretical believers, and they 
will always be a minority in the Church. They 
will be very useful too. They will keep the 
currents of religious thought fresh. They will 
be of incalculable service on the frontier of 
unbelief, succoring the outcasts who are seeking 
the way of light and rallying the fugitives who 
are making for the desert. On the other hand, 
if you withhold from them the recognition 
which is their due, if you try to put them out- 
side the Christian pale, they must suspend their 
useful labors and abandon their proper places 
and turn their hands against their blundering 
brethren ; and in this false position they will 
increase and multiply unnaturally and fill the 
Church and the world with horrid clamor and 
commotion. 



220 Prayer -Meeting Theology, 

A. You speak like yourself. You love her- 
etics. You have much in common with them. 
You are an incipient heretic yourself. So you 
have said, and I verily believe you. But you 
should speak for yourself alone, and not for 
our wives and children and the mass of ortho- 
dox Christians and the very apostles of the 
Lamb. If the Nicene creed adds to the doc- 
trine of the apostles, its additions are of no 
account for our children or for ourselves. But 
if the good old creed faithfully states and care- 
fully guards the apostolic doctrine, as it un- 
doubtedly does, it fairly earns our love and 
respect. The Nicene faith is neither more nor 
less than the faith of the baptismal formula and 
the apostolic benediction. And in this divine 
faith the wise and prudent have no particular 
advantage over the common family of devout 
believers. I utterly deny your allegation that 
Unitarians only carry a little farther thoughts 
and tendencies which are present in the minds 
of orthodox believers. You and the like of 
you live too far from the orthodox believer to 
know much about his state of mind. I, for 
one, have never felt anything but horror and 
aversion for the whole Unitarian system, root 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 221 

and branch. Its ideas do not lurk in my mind. 
I do not find them necessary for the maturing 
or for the maintenance of my faith. I have 
no use in the world for them. And I have no 
more sympathy with Unitarians than I have 
with the Jews who persecuted our blessed Lord 
because He, being a man, made Himself equal 
with God. 

C. Take that back for shame ! The Jews 
hated the Lord and hounded Him to the death. 
The Unitarians love Him and serve Him as 
sincerely as any of His disciples. And even as 
to their doctrine, you would have more sym- 
pathy with them if you were to sit down and 
develop your own Trinitarianism in detail and 
in the plain language of living men. 

A. That may be. But I have no wish to 
make the experiment. I believe in the Trinity, 
but I cannot presume to explain it. It cannot 
be explained. 

C. Just so. You and the Unitarians differ 
about what you do not understand. And you 
differ because they try to understand it and 
you do not. I say it not to blame you or them. 
I understand it as little as either of you. I 
hold on to the Nicene creed as to an anchor, 



222 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

because I know it is a tried and safe statement, 
and not because I realize fully what it means 
or believe its precise terms essential to the 
integrity of the Christian faith. Whilst using it 
faithfully as an anchor, I cannot deny myself a 
length of cable which ofttimes allows me to be 
carried very near the Unitarians. Their her- 
esy is only a concentration of what lies diffused 
in our own thoughts. It is an expression of 
difficulty rather than of unbelief. Our minds 
swing far out towards the difficulty, and then 
swing back again. The Unitarian mind has 
stood at a point where orthodox belief is im- 
possible. But our swinging to and fro and 
their standing still are matters of speculation 
merely. In practical devotion to the Saviour, 
and in the love and service of souls, we may 
walk hand in hand. 

A. Can two walk together except they be 
agreed ? 

C. Two ? Yes, millions. Barbarians, Scythi- 
ans, bond and free, all sorts and conditions 
of men, with their inharmonious medley of 
opinions, can walk together, or can learn to 
walk together, if they are led by the Spirit of 
Jesus Christ. Those who do walk together 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 223 

most harmoniously do not always " agree " in 
matters of opinion. But they walk together 
with all lowliness and meekness, with long- 
suffering, forbearing one another in love, en- 
deavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the 
bond of peace. I do not believe that members 
of the same communions always agree in opin- 
ions, even on the most momentous questions, 
any more than members of different com- 
munions. 

A. That is, you are willing to tax members 
of all Christian communions with gross insin- 
cerity. Members of the same communion pro- 
fess to be of the same opinions on great 
questions. If any of them change their opin- 
ions, they should also change their confession 
and go to their own place. Many do so at 
great cost. And it is not fair to assume that it 
is a common thing among Christians to carry 
a flag to which they have ceased to be loyal. 

C. On the other hand, I think it is neither 
fair nor wise to expect all Christian people to 
carry any flag at all to indicate mere opinions. 
As opinions are not hereditary and immutable, 
and as opposite opinions frequently thrive 
under the same teaching, uniformity of opin- 



224 Prayer-Meeting Theology. 

ions will not be found in any denomination 
unless very stringent measures are taken to 
secure it. And any thorough method of en- 
forcing uniformity would reveal at once the 
unchristian and inhuman character of the at- 
tempt. Just now I can think of only two 
methods which would have any chance of suc- 
cess. The first is suggested by a marvellous 
fragment of natural history which I learned 
one rainy day in my early childhood from a 
juvenile professor in the swamp near the Long 
Pond. This young naturalist, who possibly 
evolved his science out of his own conscious- 
ness, told me that the " polliwogs," or tadpoles, 
replenish from their own numbers the two 
distinct tribes of frogs and lizards. The frog- 
mother, so he explained, if she is willing to let 
her polliwogs become lizards, has only to 
let them alone, and lizards they become by 
dint of natural perversity. But if she wishes 
to keep them in the frog family, she must cut 
off their tails ; and when this severe discipli- 
nary operation is faithfully performed, frogs 
they are and frogs they must remain as long as 
they can crawl. In like manner, to keep the 
young members of any communion safe in the 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 225 

family opinions for ever, some such mutila- 
tion, not indeed of the body but of the mind, 
may be resorted to. Let them think, and you 
cannot tell what opinions they may adopt. 
But cut off the root of thought, and you may 
label their opinions without fear. They will 
never change. This is the simplest and surest 
way. But it is cruel and costly. It is a loss to 
the world, a deep injury to the victims, and a 
reproach to their Maker. 

The other way is to pick the members over 
and pigeon-hole them properly among the 
various denominations once a week or oftener. 
This way is a very laborious one, and almost as 
cruel as the other. It involves the turning of 
a child out of his congenial home to dwell with 
strangers with whom, perhaps, he has no bond 
of union but some miserable opinion. For 
versatile minds not steadied by experience it 
involves changes so sweeping and so frequent 
as to make it impossible for them to strike 
roots or to acquire experience of anything but 
change and unrest. And it will turn a large 
class out-of-doors, without a home to go to 
even for a time, because their minds are hospi- 
table to many views but sworn adherents of 



226 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

none. Such men are not necessarily indifferent 
or lukewarm. They are often faithful and ef- 
fective witnesses for the saving Christian truth 
which underlies the varying opinions of Chris- 
tians. None of us could ever defend the use 
of these barbarous methods to protect the most 
admirable opinions in the world. But what 
methods less objectionable would answer the 
purpose ? 

As regards both the actual lack of uniformity 
and the difficulty of securing it by any tolera- 
ble means, in our respective Christian commun- 
ions, perhaps the question of future retribution 
is a better illustration for us than the one which 
we have been considering. It is a question 
greatly agitated in our time, and a question on 
which good men in all denominations are di- 
vided. We ourselves have plenty of excellent 
men who reject more or less completely the 
view generally held among us on this solemn 
question. Yet they have no desire to leave us ; 
and they would not be likely to find a more 
congenial home if they tried every sect under 
the sun. What shall we do with them ? They 
are content to work with us as brethren. They 
seek the ends which we seek. They use the 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 227 

means which we use. They are one with us in 
spirit. Their only fault (if a fault) is that they 
feel more keenly than the rest of us the diffi- 
culties which perplex us all with regard to the 
eternal future of those who die impenitent. 
Most of us believe sorrowfully that the impen- 
itent go away in death to endless, hopeless, 
intolerable, irremediable woe. But the more 
vividly we conceive this, the harder it is to 
believe firmly. It is scarcely too much to 
say that those of us who believe it most 
strongly believe more than others in just 
about the proportion in which we repre- 
sent the matter to ourselves less clearly and 
fully than the others do. The faith of the 
sturdiest of us on this point is shocked and 
strained when we are made to feel profoundly 
what it means, as, for instance, in losing chil- 
dren by death in a state of apparent impeni- 
tence. It is easier to believe that Cain and 
Judas are in eternal torments than to believe 
the same of a beloved child or of a brother or 
sister. But all impenitent souls have lived in 
the bosom of some family ; all have had fathers 
and mothers and friends. To believe in eternal 
torments without flinching we must forget the 



228 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

faces and the voices and the human hearts of 
those who loved us though they loved not 
Christ. 

A. You are unjust to the sternest believers in 
everlasting punishment. They hold the terrible 
doctrine in continual sorrow and heaviness. 
They hold it without wavering, not because 
they are reckless of souls, but because they read 
it plainly in the word of God. They hold it true 
not of others only but of themselves also unless 
they repent and believe the Gospel. And no 
man can be expected to show a tenderness for 
others which he dare not indulge towards his 
own soul. 

C. They hold the doctrine, to be sure. I 
hold it too, though I shrink from the very name 
of it. I hold it because I cannot get rid of the 
conviction that Jesus Christ teaches it firmly 
though with divine sadness. I hold it because 
I know that my only hope of salvation is God's 
sovereign mercy, and I cannot dispute the eter- 
nity of perdition without putting forth a claim 
which is incompatible with the entire sincerity 
of a prayer for mercy. I hold it because, in 
view of God's unspeakable gift, in view of the 
humiliation and agony of the Eternal Son who 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 229 

loved me and gave Himself for me, I cannot 
pretend to say that any punishment is too sore, 
or that there can possibly remain any way of 
escape, for me, when I have trodden under foot 
the Son of God, and have counted the blood of 
the covenant wherewith I was sanctified an 
unholy thing, and have done despite unto the 
Spirit of Grace. But, while it is impossible for 
me to reject this awful doctrine of eternal 
punishment, it is the very next thing to impos- 
sible for me to believe it. The difficulty is great 
when we think of the countless multitudes of 
men like ourselves who are to be in torment 
for ever and ever. But it is greater far when 
we think of the doctrine in its relation to God 
and His glorious attributes. Think, first, of 
His love. God is love. He is the Father of 
the spirits of all men. He loves the world. 
Even the sins of men do not turn away His 
lovingkindness from them. He commendeth 
His love toward us, in that, while we were yet 
sinners, Christ died for us. He seeks that which 
is lost. But those whom He has loved and 
sought with infinite tenderness all the days of 
their life He abandons forever in their greatest 
need in the bitter hour of death. He laughs 



230 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

at their calamity. His love to them is turned 
to bitter hate. In His hot displeasure He puts 
them away from Himself for ever. He has no 
more desire to the work of His hands. He 
consents to their utter ruin. Think, again, of 
His power. He is the Almighty Maker, the 
Supreme Ruler, of all things. He has solemnly 
declared that His counsel shall stand, and that 
He will do all His pleasure. But He consents 
freely to an eternal partition of His empire. 
Having long striven to destroy the works of the 
devil and to expel evil from human life, He at 
last gives up the glorious struggle, and virtually 
says unto evil, Divide et impera. Think of 
His holiness, that essential attribute of God 
which might afford some hope to those who 
have no claim on His love. By His very na- 
ture He abhors evil. He hates it with invinci- 
ble, everlasting hatred. But He will not utterly 
abolish it. He will cease striving to abolish it, 
and content Himself with wreaking his ven- 
geance upon it for ever. He will endure it 
through all eternity though He cannot abide 
it. Think, once more, of His blessedness, and 
of the blessedness of His saints, when Christ's 
mediatorial work is done, when all His enemies 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 231 

are put under His feet, when He shall see of 
the travail of His soul and be satisfied, when 
God shall be all in all. Blessed saints, re- 
deemed and glorified, enjoying fulness of life 
and pleasures for evermore at the right hand 
of God, in sight of the impassable gulf which 
holds in eternal sorrow their brothers and their 
sisters and their own children ! The blessed 
God, all in all, with the smoke of the torment 
of the infernal prison-house and the hopeless 
lamentations of lost souls, the work of His own 
hands, rising up before His face for ever and 
ever ! 

Such thoughts, thoughts which can hardly be 
expressed without fear of blasphemy, distract 
the mind in view of the doctrine of eternal 
punishment. Still I believe this doctrine, which 
cannot be fully stated without a hardihood 
almost impious. I cannot disbelieve it. This 
life is not given unto us without a purpose. If 
we throw our life away regardless of the pur- 
pose for which it was given, we must suffer 
loss, a loss great in proportion to the worth of 
life and its opportunities; and the loss is obvi- 
ously irreparable. We can live this life but 
once. If we win the prize, it is eternal gain. 



232 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

If we miss it, we miss it for ever. The issues 
of opportunities which are not to be repeated 
are necessarily final. It is appointed unto men 
once to die, but after this the judgment. 
Death ends our earthly life and all its possi- 
bilities. And the judgment which follows 
turns upon the things done in the body. After 
the judgment, we only read of eternal life and 
eternal punishment. That is the last word of 
Christ on the subject. Can we go beyond His 
final word? "Shall we pretend to know more 
than the all-knowing, or question out of pity 
that which the perfect love declares?" I must 
believe this doctrine, shocking and terrible as it 
is. But I believe it with exceeding great in- 
firmity. And I maintain that all who seriously 
believe it must believe with more or less diffi- 
culty. Now, if all who believe it at all must 
believe it with misgivings, the misgivings may 
well be stronger in some minds than in others. 
And those who embrace the hope that all sin- 
ful souls will be restored to God, or the hope 
that a second probation will be given in another 
world to some of those who die impenitent, are 
only carried a little farther than the rest of us, 
and detained longer, in a region of thought in 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 233 

which we are all driven about and tossed more 
or less. 

A. Your difficulties in this as in other mat- 
ters are of your own making. What can you 
expect but difficulties without end when you 
allow yourself to speak of God in a manner 
which is both unscriptural and contrary to 
all sound reason? God is immutable; and you 
might spare yourself the idle thinking which 
ignores that. The teaching of Scripture as to 
the Divine decrees annihilates your main diffi- 
culty as to endless retribution. There is no 
change in the Divine Mind in relation to evil 
or in relation to man at any point from eternity 
to eternity. " God from all eternity did by the 
most wise and holy counsel of His own will 
freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever 
comes to pass." But we are not going into 
these high matters now. You took up this 
question of retribution as an illustration. You 
wished to show, I believe, that Christians may 
differ almost to any extent in their doctrinal 
views without crippling their usefulness; that 
error in doctrine does not greatly affect the 
authority of disciples witnessing for the Chris- 
tian faith. Your illustration is most unfortu- 



234 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

nate for your purpose, but a happy one for the 
interest of truth. Whatever the steps may be 
which lead men's minds to uncertainty as to the 
duration of punishment in the world to come, 
the effect of such uncertainty is always and 
necessarily the same, — a relaxation of anxiety 
and effort with regard to the great end of life. 
If any professing Christians openly question the 
express declaration of Scripture and the com- 
mon belief of the churches, that the wicked 
will be sent away to everlasting punishment, 
their authority, be it great or small, will all tell 
in favor of indifference and delay and half- 
heartedness in the great concern of the soul 
and eternity. Therefore it is right and neces- 
sary that those who care for souls and believe 
the simple and solemn teaching of Scripture 
should repudiate as false brethren and destroy- 
ers of men any and all such as profess them- 
selves Christians, and yet give an uncertain 
sound on this fateful question. 

C. You are hard on brethren whose error at 
the worst is simply infirmity of thought. It is 
unquestionably possible for men who cherish 
the so-called "larger hope " for mankind still 
to live and labor in the fear of God and in the 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 235 

faith of Jesus Christ. And it is the life of faith 
and obedience that unites us with the witness- 
ing Church and gives us power with God and 
with men. Even if a probation after death and 
the final restoration of all souls could be proved 
to demonstration (which is impossible), I should 
not dare to let such proof have any relaxing 
influence on my life here. We are now in a state 
of stupendous spiritual conflict ; and we want to 
secure a decisive victory here and now, rather 
than let the enemy retire beyond the rive* of 
death, to meet us hereafter in an unknown 
world, and perchance to hunt and harass our 
souls " o'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp," 
for untold aeons. It would be insanity to post- 
pone the battle even if we knew that in the 
world to come we shall find a battle-field and 
not an eternal prison-house. 

Besides, we have our gracious Lord's positive 
command to be always ready for His coming; 
and as Christians we must bend all our energies 
to obey His word, whatever we may believe or 
conjecture about the future life. And it is only 
fair that we acknowledge that hosts of brethren, 
eminent in the work of Christ, have avowed 
their doubt of the eternity of hell-torments 



236 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

without suffering such doubt to lessen their 
devotion to their Master's will or their zeal for 
the present salvation of souls. The great mo- 
tive with men after all is not fear but love. 
And while some brethren, without rebuke, lift 
up incessantly their warning voice, denouncing 
hell and damnation to the wicked, what if some 
others give themselves wholly to the Gospel of 
the Grace of God ? Many, who would never 
repent, like the men of Nineveh, to escape im- 
pending destruction, will still come, like the 
Queen of Sheba, from the uttermost parts of 
the earth to behold the wisdom and grace of 
One who is greater than Solomon. 

I am astonished that you should refer me for 
a solution of my difficulties to your stern doc- 
trine of the Divine decrees. The difficulties 
besetting the question of retribution are not 
lessened by the statement that eternal damna- 
tion is not an after-thought necessitated by 
man's rejection of Divine grace, but a part of 
the original purpose and plan of God before 
man rejected His grace, or committed sin, or 
had any being at all. But since you have 
mentioned the doctrine of the decrees, let it be 
our final test as to the prevalence of uniformity 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 237 

of opinions in the same religious communions, 
and as to the possibility of agreeing heartily in 
faith while differing radically and irreconcilably 
in opinions. Can you name a Calvinistic body 
in which there are not plenty of individuals, 
men and women and children, honored and 
beloved, who are diametrically opposed to 
the Calvinistic creed on the question of Predes- 
tination ? Or can you find an Arminian body 
in which the Arminian doctrine is held stead- 
fastly by all the members, young and old? 
Such a thing is no longer expected or greatly 
cared for. Calvinistic and Arminian denomi- 
nations have learned to recognize one another 
as bodies of true believers and living branches 
of the true Church of Christ. Dr. Shedd, than 
whom a worthier representative of the intellect 
and faith of Calvinism is not to be found, 
makes this admission in favor of the Armin- 
ians. But Calvinists and Arminians were not 
always thus friendly. There was a time when 
they openly denounced one another as guilty 
of doing the Devil's work in the name of the 
Lord. And their differences in opinion are 
really as wide and serious as such differences 
can well be. To the Arminian, Calvinistic 



238 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

teaching, logically followed out, leads to fatal- 
ism ; which is as bad as Universalism, to say 
the very least. To the Calvinist, on the other 
hand, Arminian teaching, pressed to its proper 
conclusion, denies the sovereignty of God — 
that is, denies the divinity of God, which again 
is at least as bad as Unitarianism, which you 
charge with denying the proper divinity of 
Christ. But Arminians have learned that they 
have no right to make Calvinists more logical 
than they wish to be. And Calvinists forbear 
to push Arminians along the Arminian road 
farther than they choose to travel. They have 
learned fairness and kindness towards one an- 
other, not by the light of nature or by the logic 
of controversy, but by the open and abundant 
blessing of Almighty God on both sides alike. 
It would be ridiculous to say that men of Jon- 
athan Edwards' persuasion cannot belong to 
the true Church, and it would be no less pre- 
posterous to refuse the right hand of fellowship 
to men of the persuasion of John Wesley. 
Calvinists and Arminians are alike confessedly 
Christian, one in faith and in the defence and 
propagation of the faith, though, on the high- 
est questions, they hold opinions which are 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 239 

utterly contradictory, and which, as viewed 
respectively from the opposite sides, subvert not 
only the Christian faith but the very founda- 
tions of natural religion. Why should we insist 
on deducing all the possible evil consequences 
from one-sided or erroneous theories of the 
person of Christ or of the final destiny of the 
human race, while we have agreed that the 
equally pernicious logical consequences of de- 
fective theories of the sovereignty of God and 
the freedom of man may remain inoperative 
and leave the theories themselves not only 
harmless but beneficent ? For it is generally 
admitted that both Calvinism and Arminianism, 
as systems of thought, serve a good purpose, 
and that by means of the very theories which 
divide them asunder and for which the one is 
branded as immoral and the other as im- 
pious. If we look for proof of God's blessing, 
if we look for the fruits of the Spirit, we shall 
not fail to find them in any of the Churches 
which profess to love Christ and to look to 
Him for salvation, whatever imperfect views 
they may entertain of His Divine person or of 
the life of the world to come. And if we con- 
sider the matter calmly, we may have reason to 



240 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

acknowledge that some of those who seem to us 
to deny our Lord's divinity have come nearer 
than ourselves to the man Christ Jesus who is 
the only Mediator, and have helped us to know 
Him better, and to work more hopefully for the 
race which He has redeemed ; and we may be 
brought to see that some of those who, to our 
mind, have erred dangerously on the solemn 
question of future retribution have yet been 
enabled to help a whole generation of Christians 
to a deeper and fuller faith in the Fatherly love 
of God, and in the matchless grace of Him who 
is mighty to save ; we may learn that in this 
dark world none of us can see very clearly more 
than a small portion of the truth, and that those 
who are most blind to what we see often need 
our loving sympathy most and can best reward 
it ; we may learn, and we ought to learn, that 
if there be risks for ourselves and for the truth 
in the exercise of candor and sympathy and ac- 
tive charity towards the weak and the wayward 
among Christ's disciples, there are risks also in 
narrow, distrustful, self-regarding, self-sufficing 
exclusiveness ; and that, in the former far more 
than in the latter, we may look for protection 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 241 

and blessing to the Father of all and the 
Saviour of all. 

A. Candor and charity and sympathy are all 
admirable; and it would be very delightful to 
live on terms of Christian brotherhood with all 
mankind. But Christian brotherhood implies 
a real substantial Christianity, and we must 
maintain the integrity of our Christianity what- 
ever becomes of the brotherhood. We must 
contend earnestly for the faith once delivered 
to the saints. And we cannot contend very 
earnestly for it unless we both know what it is 
and are prepared, for its sake, to sacrifice the 
friendship and the good opinion of all those, 
disciples or not, who are wayward enough to 
cancel its most obvious and most characteristic 
doctrines before they will honor it with their 
acceptance. Sinful men can get along without 
our sympathy and charity better than without 
the saving truth of the Gospel ; and it is better 
for us to be unconciliatory and unmannerly, 
but true, to our fellow-men, than to be tender 
to their feelings and treacherous to their souls. 

B. Certainly. And we have our own souls 
to look out for too. We ourselves, if we reject 



242 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

the Gospel, must perish. And how can we 
retain it for ourselves if we make light of it for 
others ? Unless we are very careful, the " candor 
and sympathy and active charity," which are so 
popular in the churches nowadays, will wreck 
our own faith and land us all in the bare 
Agnosticism, which is becoming more and more 
the settled faith of men of the world. " Agnos- 
ticism, professing and calling itself Christian ! " 
how will that do as a description of your 
witnessing Church? 

C. It will not do at all as a description of the 
whole Church. Even if candor and charity led 
as necessarily as you suppose they do to 
Agnosticism, we still have bigotry and brutality 
enough to insure our dogmatism for a thousand 
years. But candor and firmness are not incom- 
patible. Those Christian believers who are 
immovably fixed in their own convictions have 
most reason to deal fairly and tenderly with 
those who differ from them. Still, your descrip- 
tion will apply to a large and very interesting 
class in the Church of Christ. There are 
Agnostics who profess and call themselves 
Christians. We have no reason to question 
their sincerity. And we have but slight cause 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 243 

and but small means to attack their position. 
The great apologist, Bishop Butler, in the 
interest of the Christian faith, strongly empha- 
sized the ignorance of man. And the great 
practical theologian, Dr.Owen, labored intensely 
to mortify sin in believers by pressing home to 
them their " unacquaintedness " with God, and 
their inability to " look into the abyss of 
eternity, and to bear the rays of His glorious 
being." The vain conceit of knowledge in the 
midst of darkness and confusion is as common 
to-day as ever, and as demoralizing for mind 
and heart alike. But if we of this generation 
are to know our ignorance, and to feel our 
unacquaintedness with God, we shall probably 
owe more to the Agnostics than to Butler and 
Owen together. Nor do I know where to look 
at the present time for a more impressive testi- 
mony to the person and work of Jesus Christ 
than is found in the confession of these men 
that, with all their philosophical prejudice 
against the Gospel, and with their all but entire 
absorption in secular studies, they still have 
need of Him. 

B. It is well to sober our minds with reflec- 
tions on the ignorance of man, and to abase the 



244 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

pride and vain confidence of our hearts by con- 
templating the depths of our unacquaintedness 
with God. But it is another thing altogether 
to let such contemplations clip the wings of 
our spirits and drive us to perpetual exile from 
God. I remember the passage in Owen's 
Mortification of Sin quite well. After saying 
that we cannot bear the rays of God's glorious 
being, he adds that this consideration is of 
great use in walking with God, so far as it may 
be consistent with that filial boldness which is 
given us in Jesus Christ to draw nigh to the 
throne of grace. Do your Agnostic confessors 
use their views of man's ignorance as helps to 
closer walking with God ? Do they have much 
filial boldness and access to God through Jesus 
Christ? Are they less Agnostic since they be- 
came Christians than they were before ? Have 
they received the Holy Ghost since they be- 
lieved? Does Jesus Christ declare the Father 
to them, or does He honor Himself? Is He to 
them really a Mediator, bringing them to God, 
or only a human Consoler and Companion, a 
substitute for God, and the final proof that 
God is for them inaccessible and unneces- 
sary? 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 245 

C. Jesus Christ is a Mediator for all who 
truly come to Him. His nature is, by its very 
constitution as well as by the will of the 
Father, mediatorial. If we truly come to Him, 
we necessarily come to God through Him. 
Contact with Him is contact with God ; for God 
is in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. 
Therefore, if men, Agnostics or others, are 
attracted to Jesus Christ, and are not offended 
in Him, but love Him and honor Him, and 
find rest for their souls in Him, we need not 
trouble them or worry ourselves with the ques- 
tion whether they receive Him as a Mediator 
or only as a man. They receive Him as He is. 
They receive Him as a man because He is a 
man. They receive Him as a Mediator because 
the man is the Mediator. His friends, His 
servants, need not ask Him to show them the 
Father. They who have seen Him have seen 
the Father ; and following Him is walking with 
God.. But those who have been long with 
Him and have loved Him truly may still, like 
Philip, ask Agnostic questions and be embar- 
rassed with Agnostic difficulties, not realizing 
what treasures of wisdom and knowledge they 
virtually received when they believed in Him. 



246 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

B. Philip was rebuked for his ignorance of 
his Lord's higher nature, though he lacked the 
illumination of those great events which sub- 
sequently declared Jesus to be the Son of God. 
Can cultivated believers in Christ now live in 
such ignorance of their Lord as was blame- 
worthy in a disciple even before Jesus was 
glorified? You speak of coming to Him, and 
receiving Him. Where is He to be found? 
How does faith reach Him ? Is He to be 
found to-day in disguises which veil His proper 
glory? His first disciples saw Him through 
the thick veil of flesh and humiliation ; and 
their faith was naturally accompanied by carnal 
and unworthy thoughts of the Lord till the 
fuller revelation came. In later times many 
have found Christ through His official repre- 
sentatives in the Church. They have com- 
mitted the keeping of their souls and their 
consciences to the priest, whose directions they 
follow and in whose blessing they rest. Faith 
can doubtless live in this way ; and it may well 
be a very imperfect faith and associated with 
crass ignorance and misapprehension. But 
our Agnostics are not the men to live by such 
a faith. If they find Christ at all, they will 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 247 

find Him in the Scriptures, with all the light 
of all the dispensations shining around Him. 
If, finding Him thus, they receive Him as He 
is, and find rest for their souls in Him, the days 
of their Agnosticism are over. Their faith is 
not a blind clinging to the hem of a garment, 
or to a person practically unknown. Such faith 
is for babes and illiterates. Mature thinkers, 
acquainted with the Scriptures and with the 
world, if they come to Christ at all, will come 
to the unity of the faith and knowledge of the 
Son of God. And this consideration, to my 
mind, makes Agnostic Christianity a very 
transparent delusion. To the genuine Agnos- 
tic, New Testament Christianity is mythology. 
To the genuine New Testament Christian, 
Agnosticism is the gall of bitterness and the 
bond of iniquity. 

C. There are Agnostics to whom Christianity 
is mythology, no doubt ; and there are Chris- 
tians to whom Agnosticism is the gall of bitter- 
ness. But such extremists are no more " genu- 
ine " than their more moderate brethren on 
either side. Agnosticism, if the term means 
anything in particular, stands for that system 
of thought which maintains that phenomena 



248 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

alone are objects of knowledge ; and that, ac- 
cordingly, God is unknowable, excepting so far 
as He may manifest Himself through the phe- 
nomena of the universe. Christianity is not 
beyond the reach of this philosophical agnosti- 
cism. For Christianity is emphatically a reve- 
lation of the Invisible God through the phe- 
nomena of the world. This is its peculiarity, 
its distinguishing characteristic. The great 
mystery of godliness in the Gospel is God man- 
ifest in the flesh. The long and wonderful 
series of events by which the Christian revela- 
tion was prepared for and ushered into the 
world ; the life of the Lord Jesus Christ who is 
Himself the sum of the revelation ; the other 
long and wonderful series of events which marks 
the continuous operation and the growing as- 
cendancy of this revelation in the world ; — these 
are all conspicuous phenomena of the universe, 
and as proper objects of knowledge as the for- 
mation of the crust of the earth or the develop- 
ment of the solar system. Then, our own 
thoughts and feelings, our reverence, our fear 
our contrition, our trust, our hope, our love, 
our joy, our growing strength, and the whole 
spiritual character which is formed in us under 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 249 

the influence of the Christian revelation, are 
phenomena as real and as discernible to our- 
selves as any other phenomena whatsoever. 
Not only so, but the relations of these spiritual 
phenomena of our inward life to the phenomena 
of the Christian revelation of God are as capable 
of being investigated by personal observations 
and experiments of our own as are the relations 
of the phenomena of our animal life to the phe- 
nomena of the material world around us. The 
"soul-experiments" of Richard Baxter, to which 
he makes reference at the close of the narrative 
of his own life, were as serious, and as scientific, 
and yielded results as certain, as the physical 
experiments of Davy and Faraday; and they 
may be tried over again by any one who has 
the heart to endure travail so vast and so pro- 
longed and so spiritual. There is no reason 
why the philosophical Agnostic should not be- 
lieve in Christ as He stands in the perfect light ; 
and there is no reason why he should not reach 
the most advanced stage of Christian experi- 
ence. There are sure stepping-stones of palpa- 
ble phenomena to support mind and heart all 
the way through. 

But it is a mistake to suppose that Agnostics 



250 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

always learn what they know of Christ in Scrip- 
ture, where " all the light of all the dispensa- 
tions " shines around Him. Many of them get 
their best knowledge of Him from the faint 
reflection of His glory in some of the most im- 
perfect of His followers. They see Him in a 
far dimmer twilight than that of His own hu- 
miliation. Others obtain their knowledge of 
Him from the fragments of Gospel which are 
lightly tossed about in the currents of a frivo- 
lous literature and in the discussions and decla- 
mations of unbelievers. They would fare bet- 
ter in the hands of a Coptic or an Abyssinian 
priest. There are many more, who are tolerably 
familiar with the books of Scripture, but who 
are so bewildered by the various comments and 
conjectures and theories, constructive and de- 
structive, of old and new interpreters, that 
Scripture, to them, has scarcely any decipher- 
able meaning or intelligible use at all. It would 
be strange indeed if Agnostics, laboring under 
such disadvantages, should come directly to the 
unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son 
of God. But it would be stranger still if these 
difficulties in the way of a clear knowledge of 
Christ should also prove to be insuperable bar- 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 251 

riers in the way of faith. If men had to find 
Him wholly by their own seeking, they might 
fail because of the darkness. But if the blessed 
Lord Himself is seeking men, many may get 
hold of Him in the dark, if it be but by the hem 
of His garment; and they may cling to Him for 
life though they scarcely know Him at all. The 
Lord has always worn large and loosely flowing 
garments, some of the folds of which touch the 
hands of every man that is born into the world. 
The life of faith was possible and acceptable to 
God before the incarnation. And the glorious 
Gospel of the blessed God was not given to 
contract the sphere of the Divine mercy. It 
was given to make more perfect knowledge of 
God, and more abundant life in Him, possible to 
men, and not to take away the hope of the 
benighted and perplexed. The life of faith is 
possible to-day among the untaught heathen. 
Much more is it possible in the most backward 
Churches of Christendom, and possible likewise 
in the most advanced, where multitudes are in 
the dark through excess of light, dazzled to 
blindness by the fierce glare of unwonted 
illumination. It is possible for the Agnos- 
tic embarrassed by his wisdom, as well as 



252 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

for the barbarian overwhelmed with gross 
darkness. 

B. But the Agnostic is not embarrassed by 
his wisdom or by anything else. He is the 
calmest, most collected, most imperturbable 
of all men living. He knows the utmost 
boundaries of things. You will never sur- 
prise or betray him into anything, and least 
of all into the Christian faith. He knows defi- 
nitely what he is about and what he never can 
be about. He knows that he never can be a 
believer in the Christian God. He knows that 
the Christian God is an impossibility. When 
you say that Agnosticism is the system of 
thought which maintains that God is unknow- 
able excepting so far as He may manifest Him- 
self through the phenomena of the universe, 
you make it thoroughly orthodox. You make 
its philosophy a truism. Everybody believes 
that God is, to us, unknowable, excepting so 
far as He may manifest Himself unto us through 
the only means we have of knowing anything 
at all. The Agnostic goes a long stride beyond 
that, and maintains that God is not knowable 
at all ; that whatever is knowable unto us by 
our only means of knowing, is, for that very rea- 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 253 

son, not God, and not to be likened unto God ; 
that the only possible God of Christians, the 
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, just 
because He is known as personal and strong 
and wise and true and holy and merciful, is not 
God at all, but a gigantic phantom made in the 
image of man, a conception wholly anthropo- 
morphic, a monstrosity, an impossibility. Who- 
soever does not verily believe and maintain all 
this, is no Agnostic, and whosoever does main- 
tain it, is no Christian. 

C. Your men, it seems, are to have but one 
idea at a time. The idea may be very crude, 
but it must be vigorous and bold; and it must 
offer to every other idea the Mohammedan al- 
ternative of submission or the sword. An Ag- 
nostic who is nothing but an Agnostic, and a 
Christian who is nothing but a Christian, should 
keep out of each other's way, and avoid all 
human society, for which they are totally unfit. 
A Christian is entitled to all the truth in the 
world. An Agnostic will scarcely be satisfied 
with less. They will both come to their own 
the sooner by understanding and appropriating 
each other's fundamental ideas. And this is 
by no means impossible. The Christian, while 



254 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

rejoicing in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ 
and in the love of God, has every reason to 
join in the Agnostic protest against gross an- 
thropomorphism. The Bible is full of protests 
against it. The Agnostics make apter and more 
telling quotations from the Bible than from 
any other source. The revelation of God in 
Jesus Christ is in no way inconsistent with such 
protests. This revelation, though by a great 
mystery it is made in the flesh and through 
the phenomena of life, is made to faith ; and, 
far from being fully comprehended, it leads the 
soul to communion, in reverence and godly 
fear, with One who seeth in secret, unseen, 
and who loveth, but with a love that passeth 
knowledge. It gives us access to God for guid- 
ance, for comfort, for salvation ; but it gives 
us no comprehension of the Divine nature. 
Though, by grace, we have communion with 
God through the Spirit, none can know better 
than we do that His thoughts are not our 
thoughts, and that our ways are not His ways. 
And here, accepting the Christian revelation 
without reserve and not unacquainted with the 
Christian life, we are yet very near the funda- 
mental thought of Agnosticism. Nor will Ag- 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 255 

nostics find it impossible to approach the 
Christian view. They of course realize, even 
more than other men, the difficulty of regarding 
God as personal without disregarding His infin- 
ity and falling prone into anthropomorphism. 
But they also feel, even if somewhat less keenly 
than most other men, the force of the motives 
which constrain so many of us to believe in the 
personality and moral attributes of God at all 
risks. They feel that God ought to be the ob- 
ject of man's highest reverence and adoration. 
And they know that it would be very awkward 
and inconvenient to adore the Inscrutable 
merely for being inscrutable ; to worship we 
know not what just because it is we know not 
what ; in a word, to adopt the old saw, omne 
ignotum pro niagnifico, as our religion. They 
resent the insinuation of plain Christians that 
a God who is not personal must be " blind " 
" brute " force. They insist that God is not 
blind though He cannot see ; that He is not 
brutish though He has no intelligence. They 
suggest that there may be a mode of existence 
available for God as far higher than a righteous 
and holy personality, as a righteous and all-holy 
personality is higher than the life of the creep- 



256 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

ing thing. At the same time, they admit that 
there is that in man which is worthier than any- 
thing else we know to serve as some faint hint 
of what God may be. They declare boldly 
that " the intimate essence" of the Inscrutable 
Existence " may conceivably be identifiable 
with the intimate essence of what we know as 
Mind/' that " in so far as the exigencies of 
finite thinking require us to symbolize the In- 
finite Power manifested in the world of phe- 
nomena, we are clearly bound to symbolize it as 
quasi-psychical rather than as quasi-material " ; 
that, " provided we bear in mind the symbolic 
character of our words, we may say that ' God 
is Spirit,' though we may not say, in the materi- 
alistic sense, that God is force " ; and that the 
belief in an immortal soul and in a personal God 
" are beliefs concerning which a scientific man, 
in his scientific capacity, ought to refrain from 
making assertions because science knows noth- 
ing whatever about the subject " (supra p. 86, 
and Popular Science Monthly, Sept., 1891, p. 594). 
When Agnostics talk thus, they are so near 
Christian Theism that it is hardly worth a 
Christian man's while to quarrel with them, so 
near that it is not at all worth their own while 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 257 

to let their science or their philosophy stand 
in the way of their acceptance of Christianity 
as a practical religion. They concede that a 
certain measure of anthropomorphism is indis- 
pensable even for the purposes of a philoso- 
pher. It is easy to perceive that a larger 
measure is necessary for the purposes of prac- 
tical religion. There is no reason in the world 
why they should admit just enough for the 
speculations of the philosopher and not admit 
enough for the practical uses of the spiritual 
life of mankind. And the truth is, the spirit- 
ual life of Agnostics quietly helps itself to as 
much anthropomorphism as it may find neces- 
sary, precisely as their philosophers help them- 
selves to the smaller quantity which suffices for 
their intellectual need. Accordingly, there are 
multitudes of those who feel the force of the 
Agnostic reasoning, and whose reading and 
thinking lie for the most part in the Agnostic 
cycle, who, at the same time, feel the com- 
manding and saving power of Jesus Christ. 
Without shifting their intellectual standpoint — 
that is, without renouncing their Agnosticism, 
they betake themselves to the Son of God to 
satisfy their hunger and thirst after righteous- 



258 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

ness. They are Agnostics, and they are Chris- 
tians : and their testimony to Christ and Chris- 
tianity, if not stronger, is certainly not weaker, 
than the testimony of orthodox believers who 
never knew any perplexity at all. 

A. Say not another word. Your work is 
done. There is nothing more to be destroyed. 
The Scriptures, and the Church, and the faith 
once delivered to the saints, are all gone. Un- 
believers are now Christians, and Christians are 
unbelievers. It is all one. There is nothing 
of any consequence left to be believed. And 
yet next week we shall probably go to the 
prayer-meeting as usual. And we shall go 
through the solemn service with grave faces. 
And perhaps we shall wonder why all our 
neighbors do not care to unite with us until we 
recollect that we have not taken any pains to 
amuse those who have occasionally dropped in. 

We are old friends and companions, and we 
have been in that little church together all 
our lives. We cannot distrust or misunder- 
stand one another. But what have we got to 
say to those that are without ? How can we 
give any reason for the hope that is in us ? 
And what can we do for these children ? Shall 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 259 

we teach them the creed which we dare not 
prescribe to all Christians, and at which we 
have stumbled so hard ourselves? Having 
brought our speculations to a definite conclu- 
sion, we must call another council to mature a 
plan to continue Christian work without any- 
common basis of Christian faith. 

C. I agree with you that we have talked long 
enough for the present. But I do not think 
that anything has been said to make our Chris- 
tian work more difficult or less hopeful. The 
fact that Agnostics become Christians without 
abandoning their own philosophy or accepting 
what seems to us the proper intellectual sys- 
tem of Christianity raises new difficulties only 
for those whose contention is against the faith. 
It gives them notice that Christianity is some- 
thing more than " a religion founded on argu- 
ment " ; and that, even if they should live to 
batter down its last prop in the way of argu- 
ment, they will still have to reckon with it as a 
spiritual reality, whose subtle power may turn 
all their wisdom into folly. 

What defers the hope of the enemies of the 
faith can only bring comfort and help to its 
friends. That Christianity is a divine reality 



260 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 

and not a mere system of thought, and that it 
can attract and master men through their 
spiritual nature, not only without arguments 
but in defiance of them, are facts which should 
give us courage and confidence in greater trials 
than we have yet seen. 

There is surely no occasion for alarm as to 
our children. We may fail to bring them up 
in our own notions. They will be steeped in 
the notions of their own generation. And 
they will doubtless regard as utterly unten- 
able some of the views which have materially 
helped to determine our whole theory of the 
Gospel. But our aim must be, not to lodge 
our own views permanently in their minds, but 
to use Christian truth, as we understand it, to 
prepare their hearts to welcome and obey the 
Divine Spirit, whereby they may be made par- 
takers of the life of God and members of 
Christ. 

The earnest assertion of the objective reality 
of Christianity as a spiritual kingdom of God 
ever open to those who will press in may seem 
to set aside the Scriptures and the Church and 
make every man his own pastor and pope. But 
in fact it emphasizes the true unity of the 



Prayer- Meeting Theology, 261 

children of God and the proper authority of 
the Church and the Scriptures. The unity of 
a patriotic army may outlast its military for- 
mation and win a national triumph through 
the brave confusion of a " soldier's battle." In 
like manner, the unity of the Church, far from 
depending on this or that ecclesiastical " for- 
mation," rests on the real communion of indi- 
vidual believers with God through the Holy 
Spirit. Had it not been for this tried reality, 
the Scriptures and the Church would have lost 
every shred of authority long ago. Their 
authority is maintained by the continual veri- 
fication of their testimony in the spiritual 
realm ; and it is thus made secure for all time, 
whatever shocks and surprises our learned pro- 
fessors and lecturers may still have in store for 
us. But all authority is limited by that for 
which it exists. The Scriptures and the organ- 
ized Churches are but means of grace ; and 
they must neither contend nor compete with 
the fulness of grace to which they are to lead 
the saints. No letter of Scripture, no article of 
a creed, or canon of a Church, can be rightly 
urged against those who have reached the 
end of every commandment in walking hum- 



262 Prayer- Meeting Theology, 

bly before God and in the loving service of 
their fellow-men. Let the articles and the 
canons say what they will, these are they who 
have the word of God and keep it, these are 
they who follow the Lamb whithersoever He 
goeth. 

B. One thing, one thing only, grows very 
clear to me : The doubts, which are supposed 
to restrain our prayers, must teach us to pray 
without ceasing. They leave us just light 
enough to discover the urgency of our needs 
and our utter lack of resource other than out 
of the depths to cry unto the Lord. They 
baffle our minds, they overwhelm our hearts, 
they obscure the light of the Church of Christ, 
they blur the very pages of Holy Writ, leaving 
us barely the name of the Lord and the 
remembrance of His mercy, without any assur- 
ance that He will hear us or help us. We prayed 
before, in spite of doubt, because we had a 
little faith. But that little faith can never 
inspire the fervent, persevering, agonizing 
prayer, which alone is commensurate with our 
need. Doubt itself must for us supply the 
place of faith. We must pray, because of 
doubt, not in spite of it. Our prayer must be 



Prayer- Meeting Theology. 263 

no longer a feeble, partial, doubtful victory over 
doubt. It must be the desperate clinging of 
the utterly helpless to what doubt itself points 
out and presses upon us as our only possible 
hope. Seeing we cannot in a fair way get rid 
of doubt, we must utilize it and make it auxiliary 
to the means of grace. We must take it to 
the house of prayer and to our closet to goad 
us to more and more earnest importunity. We 
must bear it on our hearts night and day to 
incite us to greater and greater constancy. Our 
prayer of doubt must have all the humility 
and earnestness and persistence of the happy 
Christian's prayer of faith. It must have more ; 
for it must meet all the difficulties, without any 
of the encouragements, of the prayer of faith, — 
without renewal of strength, without the joy 
of acceptance, without the hope of salvation. 



THE END. 



v \ 



